(1910 – 1992)

Narayan Shridhar Bendre was born in 1910 in Indore. He was trained at the State Art School in Indore in 1929, following which he received a Government Diploma in Art from Bombay in 1933. In the year 1945 he spent his time as an artist in residence at Santiniketan, where he met his contemporaries Nandalal Bose, Ram Kinkar Baij and Binode Behari Mukherjee.

Later, during his stay at Baroda, he embarked on what is perceived as the most important phase of his career, exploring ways of combining cubist, expressionist, and abstract genres from Western Modernism into his own work which stemmed from Indian formalism. He continued to travel within India and abroad, and after he resigned from Baroda in 1966, he started experimenting with his version of pointillism. Bendre’s initial interests were conditioned by the quasi-modernist landscape painting as practiced at the Indore School. But, an avid traveller in him and a keen eye for the observation made him an artist of interest.

Among Bendre’s earliest exhibitions was a solo show at Windermere Gallery, New York in 1948. He joined the Progressive Artists’ Group the same year, upon his return to India. Where he explored his modernist ideas with his contemporaries.

Bendre achieved a very early recognition with many awards, including the silver medal awarded by the Bombay Art Society in the year 1934, and followed by the Gold Medal in 1941.

He received the highest awards for his contributions like the Padma Shri Award from the President of India in 1969 and also awarded the Padma Bhushan in 1991.