• The Progressive Artists’ Group (PAG) celebrated its 75th anniversary along with the country in 2022
  • The PAG came to stand for a phase of post-Independence Indian modernism: with India opting to be a modern secular nation with aspirations to become a world player, cultivating international ambitions became a desirable choice for individual artists
  • In the beginning, they painted landscapes or pictures of local life with beggars, farmers, potters, or street vendors in a loose realist manner with modernist overtones
  • The focus shifted quickly from subaltern subjects to self-expression and to formalist issues
  • As most of the PAG artists migrated to the West, the group became inactive and was finally disbanded in 1956
  • By the early 1960s, Indian artists, partly disenchanted by the experience of the Progressives, ceased to be enamoured of internationalism and began to fix their gaze on things closer home