Richard Bartholomew

Sepia
Gallery has a wonderful exhibition of photographs in Black and White by Richard Bartholomew. The first section deals with his wife, his two sons and his home, which I found the most beautiful. The second section dealt with his work as an art critic, where he photographed lots of the top artists in India, like Hussein, Krishen Khanna and Biren De. His street scence of Delhi were also pretty great. Especially the one of Narender Place on Parliament Street, it looked like it was a quiet road with just a few cars going by, quite a far cry from today.

His son, Pablo Bartholomew, is exhibiting just a few avenues down at Bodhi Art and his was work was quite the opposite, in that it dealt with smoking, drugs, drinks and the aftermath on men and women.

Sepia International is honored to present A Critic’s Eye, an exhibition of photographs by noted Indian art critic Richard Bartholomew (1926-1985). Widely acclaimed as a writer, painter, curator, and art critic, with solo shows of his paintings in Delhi and Bombay in the 1950s, Bartholomew rarely exhibited his photographic work during his lifetime. During the 1960s and 70s, he keenly photographed life as it revolved around him – his immediate family, his travels in India as well the United States, and his intertwined relationships with fellow members of the art world. This will be the first solo exhibition of his photographs.

Bartholomew was one of first art critics in India to start a true dialogue with the painters of the time. He created a community with them and engendered a sense of direction at a time when the public was not fully receptive to the bold artistic exploration of India’s Progressive Art Movement. Bartholomew’s incisive and sophisticated body of photographic work during that period of aesthetic and cultural ferment is equally illuminating and offers us a rare glimpse into the beginnings of Modernism in India.

Today, we tend to separate the activities of creation and criticism. As a matter of fact, they are complementary. It is true that an artist is seldom the best judge of his own work; it is equally true that though the critic may feel that a particular painting or sculpture is deficient or excessive in some aspect of communication, he cannot usually prove the artist wrong by demonstration. Yet there is one premise on which both work. Nothing can be created without a functional principle of criticism; and all criticism, good criticism that is, is constructive and is intended to foster the growth of art.

Theories of art do not make a critic; he appreciates art the better if he understands, or tries to understand, the nature of the creative process. He must know that the artist's instinct, his capacity for exploration (or experiment) and his awareness of history, personal and contemporary, determine the quality of his vision. Every artist is great, significant or mediocre in proportion to how he manages to relate these factors in the understanding of reality. There is the reality of his imagination, the reality of his technique, and the reality of the world-picture. The critic must be able to distinguish the false from the organic. –Richard Bartholomew, excerpt from Cultural Forum journal, 1950s