MUMBAI, Nov. 9 -- How do you curate the works of the last remaining Modernist from the Progressive Artists Group who, up until even a few years ago, sat at his easel, every day? Two women asked themselves this question five years ago. One was an art historian, the other a gallery director specialising in modern and contemporary South Asian art. Both based in London, one was a "pessimist", the other an "eternal optimist". And both were keen to mount a major retrospective of Krishen Khanna. Kajoli Khanna, 38, director of Grosvenor Gallery in London and the artist's grand-daughter, wanted to bring Khanna's key works, made over eight decades, under one roof. The artist, who counted contemporaries like MF Husain and Tyeb Mehta, and younger modernists like Manjit Bawa and Bhupen Khakhar among his friends, had never had a museum retrospective. Five years on, they made it happen. Starting November 11, the National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai, will host a month-long exhibition, 'Krishen Khanna at 100: The Last Progressive'. Khanna turned 100 on July 5, 2025. During his storied life, he's played many roles, including that of curator, writer, spokesperson (for the PAG), administrator, photographer, poet and collector. His life, especially after 1962, after he quit his job at Grindlays Bank, has been dedicated to art, both as an artist and as an institution builder. Born in 1925 in what is now Pakistan, Khanna studied in Lahore and later, in England after receiving the Rudyard Kipling Scholarship. He was the first Indian artist to receive the John D Rockefeller III Fund Fellowship. He used it to travel to Japan, where he was captivated by ink wash paintings, made using a technique that was developed over 1,500 years ago. "His stories of experimenting with ink wash using the bathtub of his hotel are legendary," said Kajoli, who will showcase two sumi-e (ink wash) works made by Khanna. Khanna reached out to Zehra Jumabhoy, who teaches modern and contemporary South Asian art at the University of Bristol, and co-curated The Progressive Revolution: Modern Art for a New India at the Asia Society Museum in New York in 2018, (September 14, 2018-January 20, 2019), the first exhibition dedicated to the Progressive Artists' Group at an international institution. "We got many offers from people to bankroll this project, but then two things happened. Covid struck. And the NGMA told us they wanted to keep the exhibit free of commercial partnerships," Kajoli said. "No (corporate) logos," Jumabhoy said. The task of raising funds, chasing collectors, preparing loan agreements, ensuring each work was insured, transported and installed, fell squarely on the shoulders of the duo. "And we did all this while doing our day jobs," Jumabhoy added. "Any visitor to the National Gallery of Modern Art, Delhi, the Lalit Kala Akademi and Bharat Bhavan today stands in an institution Khanna helped shape," curator Shaleen Wadhwana wrote in an essay for the Hindustan Times (July 12, 2025), examining Khanna's impact and legacy. Speaking to over 75 artists, collectors, curators and other persons in the art ecosystem, Wadhwana said Khanna's role in building institutional collections was vital. "Khanna's legacy is that he won't let us ignore the deeply unequal world we live in, and our role in shaping it for the better." Over 100 works of the artist lent by 30 collectors, including a 1962 painting once exhibited at the Leicester Galleries shipped to the NGMA by an insistent New York-based collector - will be shown at the retrospective in Mumbai. Running parallel to this show, the NGMA will exhibit a collection of other Modernists. The walls will hold many large works the artist painted over the years, such as Emmaus (1979), Pieta (2008) and Bandwallahs at a Dhaba (2015), as well as some small frames that haven't been shown before, such as Refugee Train 16 Hours Late (1947). It will also include iconic works like Spring Nude, the first work that Krishen Khanna sold to a collector (Homi Bhabha, the first director of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai). So, to return to the original question: how does one curate a lifetime's work of a very prolific master? Rather than chronology, Kajoli and Jumabhoy structured the exhibit around themes: the ground floor holds canvases that show his relationship with the other Progressives, a playful nod to Khanna's penchant for portraiture as well as his tongue-in-cheek acknowledgement of the camaraderie that existed between the Modernists. "That's how we all survived, by helping each other," Khanna once said to an interviewer, in a piece published in the NGMA Art Journal in 2022. "There was love and friendship." The Last Bite (2005) shows a group of them, Akbar Padamsee, Bal Chhabda and Khanna included, gathered around a white-haired Husain, seated at the centre as a Messiah. In another canvas, Bhupen Khakhar hovers in the corner of a painting with wings. "My grandfather often made cameos in his own works," Kajoli said. She recounted asking him whether he was one of the Bandwallahs - a reference to Khanna's eponymous iconic series - to which he mysteriously replied, "Maybe, what do you think?" Another floor offers Khanna's more politically charged pieces. Remnants of Pakistan War, 1971, an abstract work, has been placed alongside his other pieces that point to the deep psychological wound that violence, death and poverty - particularly after the 1971 war with Pakistan and Partition - left on him. We see the evolution of Khanna's figurative style in the differing versions of the trucks, including the famed 1974 Black Truck (loaned by NGMA, Delhi). Human suffering, particularly of the unnamed everyday man, formed a large part of Khanna's thematic concerns. "It has been argued that India's Modern artists did not depict the 1947 Partition. Khanna's early works prove this wrong. Many of his 1940s and 1950s paintings feature the socio-political aftermath of Partition," Jumabhoy said. In the Anatomy Lesson (1972), for instance, a group of men huddle around a table, examining what could be either a map or a shroud. The Dead and The Dying, shows a corpse covered by a blanket, and a group of people nonchalantly playing cards near him. The sacrifice of Jesus Christ and the demise of the sagely teacher from the Mahabharata, Bhishma Pitama, are metaphors for socio-political events: the splitting of brothers, the betrayal of friends, the end of innocence. At the same time, Khanna was deeply humanist, and his canvases also revealed a preoccupation with resurrection - the sheer number of Emmaus paintings Khanna made showed his obsession with it - as well as celebration. The final two floors will showcase works that refer to universal themes across religions. Large parts of floors three and four are dedicated to the tumultuous celebration of Khanna's own life and work using the "heroic figure who has come to be the most persistent subject of Khanna's oeuvre: the Bandwallah", as Jumabhoy said. The show will also present some artefacts, as well as the artist's works in sculpture and drawing. In July, in an interview with the Hindustan Times, KK had said: People will say many things. He was an important painter; we like him. More than that, I would like them to see and to understand how a painting is made. the person looking at my paintings should think: This man had a calling."...