Art: Brahmin Artist

When Nagesh Terimbakrao Yawalkar was 18 he left his father’s house in Suvasara, State of Gwalior, India and journeyed to Bombay to be an artist. At the end of two months he was sleeping in Bombay parks. Then a calendar company commissioned him to paint a goddess. After two more months of painting goddesses, young Yawalkar tired of city life and lit out for home. There he remained until about a year ago, when the young, rich, plump, art-loving Maharaja of Gwalior invited him to show his paintings at the palace, Upshot of that was that Artist Yawalkar went to Paris last year, then to London, and this week, in Manhattan, had his first big one-man show. It was also the first show of any importance by an Indian modernist in the U. S.

Slim, dark Artist Yawalkar, 23, belongs to neither of the schools into which Indian art is mainly divided: Oriental tradition and imitative academicism. His greatest admiration is for van Gogh. His idea is to combine the flowing designs and symbolism of Indian art with a strong Western technique. Into many of the paintings shown last week at Manhattan’s Delphic Studios he had mixed so much diluted Western impressionism that nothing Indian was left but subject matter. Others seemed purely Oriental. But occasionally it seemed as if Artist Yawalkar might yet use Western art as well as Gauguin and Matisse used the art of the East.