Richard Bartholomew

Richard Bartholomew (1926-1985) was an art critic, photographer, painter, poet and writer.

Early Life

Richard Bartholomew fled from Tavoy (Dawei), Burma (Myanmar), where he was born, during the Second World War. In order to escape the Japanese capture of Burma and the imminent persecution on account of their Christian names, Bartholomew fled with his family, walking the General Stilwell Road from Mandalay to Ledo in upper Assam, India. His schooling at St. Paul’s in Rangoon (Yangon) was interrupted because of the Japanese invasion and Bartholomew finished high school in Delhi’s Cambridge School. He received his Bachelor’s and Master’s Degree from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi in 1950. While at St. Stephens, he met Rati Batra, his future wife, who was herself a refugee from Pakistan who came to India during the Partition in 1947. Bartholomew lived in India as a stateless citizen till 1967 when he took on Indian citizenship, thereby closing all possibilities of returning to Burma which had become a dictatorship from the early 1960s.

Photographer, Painter, Poet

Bartholomew pursued a career not only as an art critic but also as a writer, poet, painter and curator. Solo shows of his work were held in Delhi and Bombay in the 50s. Around this time till the ‘70s, he keenly documented life around him through photography. Though he rarely exhibited his photographic work during his lifetime, his pictures intimately portrayed his family and his circle of artist friends and associates and his travels in India and the US.

Art Critic & Writer

Bartholomew was a pioneering art critic in that he was one of the first who initiated a serious dialogue with the painters of the time. He fostered a sense of community within the artists and communicated their ideals to the public who were not entirely receptive or convinced of the bold, artistic exploration of India’s Progressive Art Movement. Bartholomew’s insightful, prolific and sophisticated body of photographic work during the formative years of modern Indian art is extremely illuminating, offering contemporary readers a rare, intimate glimpse into the beginnings of Modernism in India. For him, creation and criticism were inseparable:

Today, we tend to separate the activities of creation and criticism. As a matter of fact, they are complementary. It is true that an artist is seldom the best judge of his own work; it is equally true that though the critic may feel that a particular painting or sculpture is deficient or excessive in some aspect of communication, he cannot usually prove the artist wrong by demonstration. Yet there is one premise on which both work. Nothing can be created without a functional principle of criticism; and all criticism, good criticism that is, is constructive and is intended to foster the growth of art.

Theories of art do not make a critic; he appreciates art the better if he understands, or tries to understand the nature of the creative process. He must know that the artist’s instinct, his capacity for exploration (or experiment) and his awareness of history, personal and contemporary, determine the quality of his vision. Every artist is great, significant or mediocre in proportion to how he manages to relate these factors in the understanding of reality. There is the reality of his imagination, the reality of his technique, and the reality of the world-picture. The critic must be able to distinguish the false from the organic.

Besides this series of significant articles on Indian and Tibetan art, Bartholomew also co-authored a monograph on M.F. Husain which was published by Harry Abrams, New York in 1972. In 1974, he published a monograph on Krishna Reddy. He also wrote poems and short stories which were published in prestigious magazines like Thought and Illustrated Weekly.

Gallerist & Curator

Bartholomew was the Gallery Director of Kunika-Chemould, New Delhi’s first commercial gallery for contemporary art. Subsequently, from 1966-1973, he worked with the Tibet House, New Delhi as their curator and development officer where he personally catalogued the Dalai Lama’s collection of religious artifacts and travelled with them to the US and Japan. He was also the recipient of the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship in 1970. He was appointed Commissioner of the Silver Jubilee of Indian Independence exhibition held in Washington DC in 1973 and travelled to UK in 1982 as a British Council Visitor and as Commissioner of the Festival of India Exhibition held in Britain in 1982. Bartholomew served as the Secretary of the Lalit Kala Akademi from 1977 to 1985.

Barely 58, Bartholomew died in office in 1985. He is survived by his wife Rati Bartholomew and his two sons Pablo[[1]] and Robin.

External Links

website

Geeta Kapur on Richard Bartholomew

Ram Rahman on Photography in India, Seminar

Richard Bartholomew - Sepia Gallery Exhibition, NYC

"Outside In" Related exhibition link of his photographer son,Pablo Bartholomew