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Jyoti Bhatt was born in 1934 in Bhavnagar, Gujarat, in what was then British India.  His father, Manbhai, founded and ran Bhavnagar’s Shishu Vihar (social service organization with focus on children and women https://www.shishuvihar.org/).  Through that organization, which provided child care and early education, Bhatt received exposure to Gandhi’s humanistic principles as well opportunities to create art, specifically drawing (“Jyoti Bhatt,” Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation website).  At age 12 he showed a painting of an “untouchable” man in a school art exhibition that drew protests from some parents but was supported by his teacher, who treated his students as legitimate artists and defended their work on grounds of freedom of expression (Kalra).

In 1950, Bhatt was among the first students accepted to the newly-formed fine arts department at MSU (Maharaja Sayajirao University) Baroda, which was to become his lifelong artistic home, first as a student and later as a teacher.  He initially studied painting, including mural and fresco painting, and then printmaking as well as photography.  His mentor was K. G. (Kalpathi Ganpathi) Subrmanyan, an artist and educator who had been involved in the nationalist movement and who emphasized links between modernist art practices and indigenous cultural craft (Kumar).  Baroda’s fine arts department encouraged students to be conscious of their role as artists and art educators in the emerging independent nation of India (Raza).  After gaining practice in mural painting by assisting some of the teachers at Baroda, in 1953 Bhatt spent time formally studying mural and fresco painting at Banasthia Vidaypith, Rajasthan, which then led him to receive commissions to make murals of his own, including one at Parliament House, New Delhi (Bhatt, “Yatra: My journey”).  During his early studies Bhatt also learned woodcut and lithography methods of printmaking, which at the time were the only two printmaking processes that Baroda was equipped to teach (Bhatt, “Yatra: My journey”).  In 1956 he viewed the travelling MOMA exhibition, Family of Man (curated by Edward Steichen), in Ahmedabad, which opened his eyes to the possibilities of experimental, painterly uses of the camera (Raza).

Inspired by the work of Krishna Reddy, Bhatt sought to learn additional printmaking techniques, specifically multi-color intaglio.  In 1961-62 he received an Italian government scholarship to study printmaking at the Academia di Belle Arti, Naples, where he learned etching and collagraph but not multi-colour intaglio.  A Fulbright scholarship allowed Bhatt to finally learn multi-colour intaglio as well as screenprinting at the Pratt Institute in New York, where he studied from 1964-66 (Bhatt, “Yatra: My journey”).  Wishing to incorporate photographic imagery into his prints, he spent his summer vacation in 1972 working at a relative’s commercial printing and manufacturing company learning how to create photo-based screenprints.  By that point Bhatt was teaching at Baroda, and introduced all the new printmaking methods he had learned into the curriculum (Bhatt, “Yatra: My journey”). He even commissioned his neighbor to build an etching press based on design sketches he had made of one when visiting the Tamarind Workshop in New York; the resulting press is likely the first indigenously manufactured etching press in India (Bordewekar, "Machines").

In 1967, Bhatt participated in a Bombay seminar on the folk arts of Gujarat, organized by the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan educational trust.  His participation in the seminar allowed him to travel through rural villages and tribal regions of Gujarat, photographing cultural artifacts and traditional folk art.  Bhatt later wrote about this experience that it had “taken a special place in [his] heart,” and he eagerly took up subsequent opportunities to continue his photo documentation with artist colleagues.  Bhatt noted the urgency of this work in light of India’s rapid modernization following independence: “Many of the folk arts and crafts were slowly dying out or had disappeared altogether. The clothes people wore, their homes and occupations were gradually undergoing a metamorphosis, along with their attendant values and norms. lt was vital to record what remained before it got completely obliterated” (Bhatt, "Walls and Floors").  Although documentary photography might not have been his preferred medium as an artist, Bhatt later commented, “somebody should be doing it and there are not enough of them … as a photographer, I could do a little more for my country than I could do as a painter” (Bordewekar, "The Printed Image").

During this period Bhatt began using the camera not only for documentary purposes, but also as a tool for experimentation in fine art, using double exposure and other darkroom techniques to expand his artistic practice.  As noted above, he also incorporated photographic elements into his printmaking work.  Bhatt’s early experimental photography work was shown with that of fellow Baroda faculty members in a 1969 Mumbai exhibition he helped to organize called “Painters with a Camera” (Bordewekar, "The Printed Image").  The exhibition was important in forwarding photography as a fine art form in India at a time when its national art academy would not include photographs in its exhbitions (The Jyoti Bhatt Collection, map-india.org).

Bhatt taught at MSU Baroda until his retirement 1993 (Bordewekar, "The Printed Image").  He still lives in Vadodara (formerly called Baroda) and has continued his artistic practice and exhibition of his work.  Over his career, he has received many awards for his work including the President’s Gold Plaque, a gold medal at the International Print Biennale, Italy, and the top prize at the FOTOKINA world photography contest, Germany.  His work can be found in institutional collections including the Tate Modern, the Uffizi Gallery, the British Museum, and MOMA (The Jyoti Bhatt Collection, map-india.org).

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Bhatt’s painting and prints frequently feature flat, graphic elements and bright colors.  Many of the works are composed of multiple images arranged in fairly regular rectangular grids.  Motifs include schematic faces in profile, hands and feet, symbols such as hearts, and animals often found in Indian folk art (birds, fish, snakes, scorpions, dogs).  Many of his paintings and prints also feature text (in Hindi or English), which Bhatt says he includes for its visual, rather than linguistic or communicative, properties (Bhatt, “Yatra: My journey”).  The symmetric grid composition and use of decorative geometric patterns to partition rectangular sections seen in his work resemble those found in rural/tribal wall and floor art of the sort Bhatt often documents in his photography.  Bhatt credits his teachers at Baroda, including N. S. Bendre and Sankho Chaudhuri as well as K. G. Subramanyan, for making him aware of “the graphic characteristics and potentials of two dimensional folk motifs” (Bhatt, “Yatra: My journey”) and has acknowledged their influence in the elimination of illusory spatial depth in his paintings and prints.

The stylized face in profile that recurs in Bhatt’s work does not include enough detail to identify a particular individual’s identity or emotional expression.  Bhatt connects the face motif to his time in New York where he first heard the expression “a face in the crowd” and it resonated with his experience there, much in contrast to how he had felt when home in Baroda.  For Bhatt, he later wrote, the face “served as a symbol for depicting the contemporary human conditions without becoming conspicuously narrative or illustrative” (Bhatt, “Yatra: My journey”).

Starting in the late 1960s, Bhatt began incorporating photography into his work.  He took photographs in his documentary studies of rural and tribal folk art traditions but, as noted above, he also explored the use of the camera, and darkroom techniques, as a creative outlet.  He also began incorporating photographic imagery into his prints.  Bhatt has commented on his work’s use of what he calls “auto-graphic” (hand-drawn) and photographic images, particularly when both take folk art motifs as their subject:  “I have often borrowed traditional motifs from their original visual expressions such as Rangavalli [floor art, aka rangoli], ritualistic and secular wall drawings, tattoos etc. While doing that, I have tried to 'translate' them into the visual vocabulary necessary for my print-making mediums. But when my intention was to "quote" a motif or work of another artist, then I have used a photographic method to make it a kind of a facsimile” (Bhatt, “Yatra: My journey”).

Bhatt was part of the Baroda Group of Artists, which held exhibitions between 1956 and 1962.  Made up of teachers and students from MSU Baroda, the group’s work reflected the school’s philosophy of creating a local modernism inspired equally by regional folk art and indigenous craft tradition, and principles of international modernist art (Baroda Group; Contemporary Art Movements in India).  The group stood in opposition to the Bengal School’s nationalism, which was also influenced by indigenous folk art but in a way that was seen as becoming too constraining of individual artistic creativity. In 1959 Bhatt authored a letter signed by the group, in which they declined to participate in an exhibition to be held by the Lalit Kala Akademi (the Indian National Art Academy) on the grounds that the submission form required artists to classify their work as either modern, academic-realist, or “oriental,” which they rejected as a false, arbitrary distinction (Bhatt, "Letter from the Baroda Group").  Bhatt was also a member of Group 1890, a short-lived national art movement (it had only one exhibition), formed in 1962, that advocated abandoning the search for a coherent identity of “modern Indian art” in favor of art that is “unique and sufficient unto itself, palpable in its reality and generating its own life” (Group 1890 Manifesto).  Although Bhatt was part of these artist groups and presumably sympathetic to their agendas, in later interviews he spoke of the multifaceted nature of his artistic practice, interests, and inspirations, using the metaphor of a burp:  Over his life he took in a wide variety of experiences and observations that later bubbled up, perhaps not entirely intentionally, in his work (Bhatt, “Yatra: My journey”; Myers).

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Here we examine in more detail two prints by Bhatt: the 1972 screenprint A Face, and the 1973 hand-tinted lithograph Beginning of the Journey.

Both works are modest-sized and printed on a warm white ground.  In A Face (Fig. 4), we see the schematic face in profile that has appeared as a motif in many of Bhatt’s works, in this case colored a flat black.  Here the face serves as a masking device to reveal, within its boundaries, an image of a peacock (the national bird of India) pecking through some vegetation.  The peacock, which is foregrounded, is printed in the same warm white as the print’s background, which produces some tension in the figure-ground reading of the print.  Behind the peacock image, written against the black of the face in profile, are nearly illegible lines of Hindi text printed mainly in brown but also, in some places, in blue.  The text is relatively small, arranged in crowded horizontal lines, in a way that calls attention to its visual or graphic properties more than to what it is saying.  Color is used effectively in the print to segregate the different layers or figures, with the face profile in black, the text on top of it in brown, and the peacock on top of the text in white that is matched to the ground color of the print.  The exception to this tidy segregation is the use of blue, which is used to render some features of the peacock (such as its eye) and the vegetation it is feeding on, but also some bits of the text as well.  As with the use of white for both background and peacock image, the use of blue for both foreground figure and the text behind it disrupts the clean separation of layers in the print in terms of their apparent position in the foreground or background.  As a consequence, the image is somewhat flattened in terms of apparent depth by the fusing of different layers.  This flatness is even more apparent in the graphic quality of the various pictorial elements in the print, which are represented by color blocks that exhibit minimal variation in apparent tone or value.  The peacock, and the face it is imposed upon, read as flat graphic images (depictions of objects) rather than as realistic depictions supported by an illusion of spatial depth.

In Beginning of the Journey (Fig. 7), we see a more complicated arrangement of images.  The print is structured, at least loosely, following a grid composition comprised of two rows and three columns.  Each cell of the grid holds what could be its own, free-standing work.  The dominant color in the print is a warm reddish brown.  It seems likely that this was the only ink color used in printing the lithograph, which was subsequently hand colored.  With the exception of the lower-center panel, which as elaborated below receives more extensive coloring, virtually all the hand coloring in the remainder of the print is done in a single shade of yellow.  (There are a few spots painted instead with orange, apricot, or gray.)  The print is anchored on the image in the lower center cell of the grid, which depicts a woman (or goddess) facing the viewer with her hands held up, palms forward.  She seems to have four legs, or possibly she is being borne on a platform held aloft by two people who are carrying her.  Unlike the other images that surround this central figure, the image of the woman is given a solid frame, including a checkerboard roof, and the background behind her is fully colored in with blue and green as well as yellow.  This is in contrast to the surrounding images which are printed directly against the blank ground of the entire print.  Those surrounding images include additional human figures (a snake charmer, a holy man) as well as various animals such as snakes and birds.  We also see decorative patterns used throughout, many of them resembling patterns found in the rural folk art that Bhatt studied across his career.  Again, these images are rendered in a flat, graphic style.  We also see Hindi text sprinkled throughout the print, which is used to label the identity of the various figures shown in the print (e.g. thotha, meaning “parrot,” labels the bird in the upper left corner of the print).  This crowded, vibrant print brings together a great many of the motifs that recur time and again in Bhatt’s work.

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1. Jyoti Bhatt, Lost Pundit, 1966, mixed intaglio print on paper.

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2. Jyoti Bhatt, For You Only, 1968, lithograph on paper.

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3. Jyoti Bhatt, Faces, 1970, mixed intaglio print on paper.

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4. Jyoti Bhatt, A Face, 1972, screenprint on paper.

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5. Jyoti Bhatt, A Face, 1972, mixed intaglio print on paper.

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6. Jyoti Bhatt, Kalpvruksha, 1972, mixed intaglio on paper.

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7. Jyoti Bhatt, Beginning of the Journey, 1973, hand-tinted lithograph on paper.

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Figure 1. Jyoti Bhatt, Lost Pundit, 1966, mixed intaglio print on paper, 45.7cm x 45.7cm.  Image courtesy of Jyoti Bhatt and Asia Art Archive, https://aaa.org.hk/archive/24804  Accessed November 3, 2020.

Figure 2. Jyoti Bhatt, For You Only, 1968, lithograph on paper, 43.1cm x 35.5cm.  Image courtesy of Jyoti Bhatt and Asia Art Archive, https://aaa.org.hk/archive/24276 Accessed November 3, 2020.

Figure 3. Jyoti Bhatt, Faces, 1970, mixed intaglio print on paper, 26cm x 24.7cm.  Image courtesy of Jyoti Bhatt and Asia Art Archive, https://aaa.org.hk/archive/23716 Accessed November 3, 2020.

Figure 4. Jyoti Bhatt, A Face, 1972, screenprint on paper, 53.3cm x 43.1cm.  Image courtesy of Jyoti Bhatt and Asia Art Archive, https://aaa.org.hk/archive/24584 Accessed November 3, 2020.

Figure 5. Jyoti Bhatt, A Face, 1972, mixed intaglio print on paper, 27.3cm x 21.5cm.  Image courtesy of Jyoti Bhatt and Asia Art Archive, https://aaa.org.hk/archive/23717 Accessed November 3, 2020.

Figure 6. Jyoti Bhatt, Kalpvruksha, 1972, mixed intaglio on paper, 50.1cm x 33cm.  Image courtesy of Jyoti Bhatt and Asia Art Archive, https://aaa.org.hk/archive/17337 Accessed November 3, 2020.

Figure 7. Jyoti Bhatt, Beginning of the Journey, 1973, hand-tinted lithograph on paper, 36.8cm x 48.2cm.  Image courtesy of Jyoti Bhatt and Asia Art Archive, https://aaa.org.hk/archive/17149 Accessed November 3, 2020.

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“Baroda Group.” Wikipedia website, last updated 6 January 2020; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baroda_Group Accessed October 29, 2020.

Bhatt, Jyoti.  “Yatra: My journey.”  An Overview of Graphic Prints by Jyoti Bhatt, 2004, Bayer ABS Limited Gallery, Vadodara, India.  https://aaa.org.hk/en/collections/search/archive/jyoti-bhatt-archive-solo-shows/object/an-overview-of-graphic-prints-by-jyoti-bhatt  Accessed October 29, 2020.

Bhatt, Jyoti. “Letter from the Baroda Group of Artists to the Secretary of Lalit Kala Akademi.” 7 January 1959, Asia Art Archive, https://aaa.org.hk/archive/11212  Accessed October 29, 2020.

Bhatt, Jyoti. “Walls and Floors: The living traditions of village India.” Exhibition catalog essay, 1994. https://cdn.aaa.org.hk/_source/digital_collection/windows/india.intern/20160902_145924_0.pdf  Accessed October 29, 2020.

Bordewekar, Sandhya. “Machines in the service of artists.” Art India, 2006, Volume XI, Issue 1, Quarter 1, 75-76. https://cdn.aaa.org.hk/_source/jb-feat2006-artindia.pdf  Accessed October 29, 2020.

Bordewekar, Sandhya. “The Printed Image.” Saturday Times, 28 April 1998. https://cdn.aaa.org.hk/_source/digital_collection/windows/india.intern/cbe1241c-94e6-4b9d-ab4d-0759be4750c9.pdf  Accessed October 29, 2020.

“Contemporary Art Movements in India.” Contemporary Art India website http://www.contemporaryart-india.com/art%20_movements_in_india.php Accessed October 29, 2020.

“Group 1890 Manifesto.” Exhibition catalog, 1963. https://cdn.aaa.org.hk/_source/1963-group1890.pdf Accessed October 29, 2020.

“Jyoti Bhatt,” Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation website. https://jnaf.org/artist/jyoti-bhatt/ Accessed October 29, 2020.

Kalra, Vandana.  “Interest in how painters have used the camera is recent: Veteran artist Jyoti Bhatt.” Indian Express, August 19, 2019. https://indianexpress.com/article/express-sunday-eye/interest-in-how-painters-have-used-the-camera-is-recent-veteran-artist-jyoti-bhatt-5910639/

Kumar, R. Siva. “Subramanyan, K(alpathi) G(anapathi).”  Grove Art Online, 2003.  https://doi.org/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.article.T082181  Accessed October 29, 2020.

Myers, Kathryn.  “Regarding India: Conversations with artists.” [Interview with Jyoti Bhatt] 2013. https://vimeo.com/60842679 or https://regardingindia.com/portfolio/jyoti-bhatt/ Accessed October 29, 2020.

Raza, Nada. “Jyoti Bhatt, Baroda, c. 1969.” March 2014, updated August 2018. Tate Gallery website. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/bhatt-baroda-p81234  Accessed October 29, 2020.

“The Jyoti Bhatt Collection.” Museum of Art & Photography, Bangalore, India website. https://map-india.org/special-collection/jyoti-bhatt-archives/?_page=about Accessed October 29, 2020.