Paritosh Sen

Paritosh Sen (born Dacca, now Dhaka, 26 September 1918 – died Kolkata, 22 October 2008) was one of the leading Indian artists of the twentieth century. Born in what is now the capital of Bangladesh, he is remembered above all as a founder member of the Calcutta Group, an art movement established in 1942 that did much to bring modernism into Indian art.

Sen trained in Paris, studying at the Académie André Lhote, the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, the École des Beaux-Arts and the École du Louvre. Back in India he taught first in Bihar and then at Jadavpur University, and in the late 1940s he also taught art at the Daly College in Indore. He received a French fellowship for design and typeface in 1969 and a Rockefeller Fellowship in 1970.

He exhibited widely in India and abroad, including the Calcutta Group exhibition of 1944, London in 1962, the São Paulo Biennale of 1965, the New Delhi Triennale (1968, 1971 and 1975), Sweden in 1984 and the Havana Biennial of 1986. In 1959–60 he published Zindabahar, a book of autobiographical sketches in which he commemorated the Dacca of his childhood. He died in Kolkata.