India, July 13 -- The Poet is unlike any Rabindranath Tagore sculpture there is. It has hollowed eyes, sunken cheeks, a lifeless beard and an excavated, hollowed brain. The composition is fragmented, distorted, yet vaguely familiar. In the work, sculptor Ramkinkar Baij (1906-1980) has rendered the Nobel Laureate in Cubist style.

Pioneered by French artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, Cubism was influenced by the industrialization of the 1900s, when machines, factories, trains, buildings and geometric and structured shapes mushroomed rapidly and everywhere.

Like Baij, many Indian artists, especially the modernists, experimented with the art form. They broke away from traditional Indian styles and created new ways to express Indian ...