Krishen Khanna

Krishen Khanna (born 5 July 1925) is an Indian artist.

He attended Imperial Service College in England and is a self-taught artist.

Khanna was born on 5 July 1925 in Lyallpur (now Faisalabad, Pakistan).

When he was two years old, his family moved to Lahore.

His early studies began at the Sacred Heart High School in the city.

His father Kahan Chand Khanna was a teacher in an intermediate college.

In 1930, his father traveled to England to pursue his doctorate.

On his return to Lahore, he brought copies of Leonardo Da Vinci's Self Portrait and The Last Supper.

Young Krishen was delighted to see these creations which left a lasting impression of art on him.

Khanna’s family moved to Multan in 1936.

He received the Rudyard Kipling Scholarship in 1938 at the age of 13 and travelled from Bombay to Britain on RMS Strathmore.

Through this scholarship he was admitted to the Imperial Service College in England where he studied art for the first time.

During the Second World War in 1942, Krishna Khanna passed the examination from Oxford and Cambridge School of Certificate with a subject in arts.

In 1944, the Khanna family moved to Lahore from where he completed his B. A. honours from the Government College.

The year 1946 was an important moment in his life when he enrolled in Sheikh Ahmed's studio to study drawing and also started working in Kapoor Art Works.

Here, he learned the technique of painting as well as printing.

Khanna earned Rs 350 every month in this job.

With his first salary he had bought a work by Prannath Mago and thus began his life as an artist.

In the same year, he participated in the annual exhibition of Punjab Art Society wherein his work Dead Tree was highly appreciated.

The years that followed were quite challenging.

There was chaos in the country due to communal riots.

It became clear for the Khanna family that it would not be possible to stay in Lahore under those circumstances.

On 12 August 1947, the family of five members came to India in a car leaving their home behind and migrated to Shimla.

In India, a settled life for Khanna began in 1948 when he was appointed as an officer in Grindlay’s Bank, Mumbai.

This job was a sigh of relief for his family as it helped them to sustain themselves.

During his time in Mumbai, Khanna met S. B. Palsikar who soon became his close friend.

During the exhibition at Bombay Art Gallery, Krishna Khanna met F. N. Souza which turned into a lasting friendship.

This was followed by close acquaintance with the remaining members of the Progressive Artists' Group – M. F. Husain, Ambadas Gade, S. H. Raza, K. H. Ara, and Sadanand Bakre.

His work News of Gandhi's Death was displayed in the Golden Jubilee Exhibition of the Bombay Art Society, which was highly praised.

The famous art critic of the time, Rudolf von Leyden wrote extensively about this work by Khanna and said that he would be among the best artists of India.

In this way his life got back on track, but the pressure of the job continued to be there.

Khanna's first painting was sold to Dr. Homi Bhabha in 1949 who was collecting works for the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research.

In 1953, he was transferred to Madras.

Here he composed works of the Musician series, inspired by Carnatic music and Bharatanatyam.

In 1955, Khanna held his first solo show in Madras.

He worked at the bank till 1961 when he resigned to devote himself to art fulltime.

He is recipient of the Rockefeller Fellowship in 1962, the Padma Shri in 1990, and the Padma Bhushan in 2011.

He was awarded the Rockefeller Fellowship in 1962 and was an artist-in-residence at the American University in Washington in 1963-64.

During the early phase of his career Khanna enjoyed experimenting with texture in a muted colour palette.

This was a time when some critics felt that like some of his peers, he might move away from the figurative style for the abstract.