Mohan Samant

Mohan Samant (1924-2004) was born in Bombay and was an early Indian modernist painter and member of the Progressive Artists’ Group. In 1952, he received his diploma from the J.J. School of Art, where he studied under Shankar Balwant Palsikar. He was then awarded the Governor’s Prize and the silver medal for watercolours at the Bombay Art Society Annual Exhibition in 1954. 

Samant joined the PAG in 1952, and took part in several of their group exhibitions, including the 1953 show, ‘Progressive Artists’ Group: Gaitonde, Raiba, Ara, Hazarnis, Khanna, Husain, Samant, Gade’ at the Jehangir Art Gallery. After the PAG disbanded in 1954, he became a participant in the Bombay Group, one of its successors. 

In 1956, Samant received three awards: a gold medal at the Bombay Art Society’s group exhibition, another at the Calcutta Art Society show, and the Lalit Kala Akademi-All India Award. Samant spent 1957 to 1958 in Rome on a scholarship awarded by the Italian government. In February 1959, he received a Rockefeller Fellowship in New York City, where he lived until 1964. 

Samant returned to Bombay from 1965 to 1968. During that time his work was still shown in New York, where he was represented by World House Galleries. In 1968, Samant left India permanently. He went back to New York, where he continued to work and to exhibit internationally. 

Throughout his career, Samant took part in exhibitions both in India and internationally. His work is in a number of public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D. C.; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D. C.; and the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi. In 2000, Samant received the Asian American Heritage Award for lifetime achievement in the arts. In January 2004, not long after a retrospective in India, he died in New York.