PERMANENT MUSEUM COLLECTIONKejriwal Museum
The evolution of the New Era rests on the cornerstone of Knowledge and Beauty.
In 1995, Mr. H.K.Kejriwal, art connoisseur and collector, donated his family’s art collections which were then displayed in spacious galleries in the Parishath.
Mr. Kejriwal’s donations consist of about 400 paintings, prints, drawings and 100 sculptures. The Avant Garde of Indian modern art, both painting and sculpture, are the highlight of gallery two in the Kejriwal collection. Paintings and sculptures by Indian’s foremost artists are displayed in the gallery showcasing the widening concerns and practices of several generations of artists.
Gallery one and two of the Kejriwal collection hold an extensive number of works dating from 1800s to the 1950s. The folk paintings, Kalighat drawings, Santhal Pat (scrolls) and Patta Chitra rolls are housed in gallery one along with a collection of caricatures by Gagendranath Tagore and also several graphic prints, aquatints and lithographs, including those by the Daniels. The works of Ramkinker Baij, Binod Behari Mukherjee, Abhanindranath Tagore, Rabindranath Tagore, Amrita Sher Gil, S.H.Raza and Jamini Roy can be seen in this gallery that holds work that is distinctive of the Nationalist art movement in Bengal and the building of an Indian modernist expression.
In the third gallery displaying the Kejriwal collection, there is a grouping of paintings called the Pan Indian Panorama; this collection consists of work by the progressive artists group as well as the generations to follow through until the 90s. The works of S.G.Vasudev, Yusuf Arakkal, Anjoli Ela Menon, G.R.Iranna, Laxma Goud and others are part of the display including artists who belonged to different artistic schools and geographic regions in India.
In 1998-99 a sculpture gallery was also added to the Parishath complex. The collection of sculptures in the galleries of the Parishath has works of artists like Sunil Das, Shyamal Dutta Roy, Bikash Bhattacharjee, Bimal Kundu and Meera Mukherjee. Most of these artists were part of a movement initiated to indigenize the sculptural movement after the deep impact of the colonial period. In the beginning of the 20th century all conventional definitions of art were being systematically challenged, and in India, modern sculptors were grappling with problems of form and content, idiom and expression. The sculptures housed here are of different mediums-terracotta, bronze, fiberglass, ceramic etc. The gallery also contains drawings and sketches from many artists.
The stairwell walls contain an assortment of works in the traditional and folk styles (largely Gond paintings). There is also a series of English book illustrations in the form of engraving prints with the corresponding text pages. They are part of the Kejriwal collection.
