Magda in India

Magda had left a difficult life in Russia for a difficult life in Europe. And now she was settling in for a difficult life in Bombay. According to her friend in India Hilde Holger, "Magda was poor her whole life and never earned enough to live on."

Some aspects of Indian life were perhaps familiar to Magda. The political engagement and debates and the experimentation with "avant-garde" approaches to art in Bombay in the late 1930s and 1940s mirrored those that had taken place in Saint Petersburg and Moscow earlier in the century. Also familiar to Magda would have been accusations hurled at contemporary Indian artists of having become epigones of the West, or the opposite—revivalists of ancient traditions that had lost their vitality in the modern world. The urgent question, "how to stay Indian and become modern," echoed the earlier question, "how to stay Russian and become modern." Both countries were "Oriental," as it were, experiencing an anxiety of influence, looking longingly at Western modernity and at the same time reinventing, and also inventing, their folk traditions as part of an expression of national identity.

In the 1930s, when Magda was in Berlin, modernism in Europe fell victim to the forces of Nazism, which had relegated all of modernism to the category of degenerate art, and Soviet Communism, which insisted on socialist realism as the only legitimate form of artistic expression. At the same time, art in India, and in particular in Bombay, was experiencing the fervor of new discovery. New ideas were encouraging experimentation in India of the sort that Magda had witnessed first in Russia and then in Berlin. A significant role was played by European emigrants, among whom were modernist artists and discerning collectors who brought with them the artistic tastes of modernism and generously shared their experience with the young artists of Bombay (just as the European emigrants of that time contributed to the birth of American expressionism). As the art critic Rudolf von Leyden wrote in the Times of India, "Bombay appears to be an art minded city. One exhibition follows the other."1

Soon after arriving in Bombay in 1936, Magda became a member of the Bombay Art Society (BAS) and began exhibiting. The BAS catalogue for 1937 contains two paintings by Magda. One of them is a sketch of a street scene on Malabar Hill, where Magda and Acharya settled in 1936, remaining there for the rest of their lives.

Magda's interest in the life of the street, in the simple poor people surrounding her, manifested itself from her first days in Bombay and would be noted by critics as a characteristic feature of her work. The large tree on the left side of the picture seems to have grown along with the old house, echoing its shape with the shape of its trunk. Indeed, such small old houses—"bungalows" as they are called here—still stand on Malabar Hill. Unfortunately, in the catalogues of that time almost all illustrations are black and white. But even from this old reproduction one can judge how picturesque the original must have been: the play of light and shadow on the sun-drenched white walls of the house and swaying foliage brushed in light strokes fill this cozy courtyard with air and light.

As critics noted, Magda Nachman was a versatile artist. She painted group portraits, rural and urban landscapes, still lifes, and sketches of dancers. She worked in oils, watercolors, pastels, colored pencil, and charcoal. But the whereabouts of most of her paintings are unknown. Magda's known works of her Indian period are either illustrations in exhibition catalogues or commissioned portraits. Several paintings of this period reside in private collections in America, Great Britain, and Israel.

Jehangir Sabavala was one of the most interesting young artists whom Magda met in Bombay. Around the same time, Magda painted a portrait (whereabouts unknown) of his future wife—Shirin, and a few years later, a portrait of Shirin's sister Kamal Wood (the portrait is in a private collection and is not available for inspection). According to Shirin, both portraits were unusual in their execution and expressiveness.

Hilde Holger, a Viennese teacher of modern dance and a well-known dancer in Europe, emigrated to India in 1939. Hilde and Magda became close friends and colleagues: Hilde opened a modern dance school in Bombay for which Magda created costumes and sets for the school's productions and made sketches of the students.

This portrait was painted fifteen years after Magda's departure from Russia. In the foreground is an old woman, a scarf falling from her head onto her shoulders, revealing her gray hair. Directly behind her is a field of flowers; still further—a stylized image of a Russian village with huts and a church on a high hill. The sitter's gaze is fixed dreamily in the distance. It seems that in her mind's eye is the image that the viewer sees behind her—the memory of the motherland.

Magda Nachman. Old Woman. BAS Catalogue, 1937

Photo from the journal Aesthetics (February–March 1951). This large picture was painted in 1945, in Meteran, on the estate of Magda's friend, the artist Lee Gotami.

As can be seen from the works presented here and as noted in contemporaneous reviews of her exhibitions, Magda Nachman as is somewhat conservative an artist. She had made that choice long ago, back in Russia, rejecting a pure abstraction. At the same time, reviewers call her a "connoisseur of the Indian soul," an artist who has seen and expressed the human dignity of the destitute and the neglected. Contemporaries noted that the rendering of her models' eyes is especially expressive: her brush allows you to see something that nonartists usually do not notice—light, shade, and depth, the soul itself. Her craftsmanship as a draftsman was appreciated by many.

One of the admirers of Magda Nachman's art, the famous art historian Hermann Goetz wrote that she was

not a painter of dreams, but a portraitist, an interpreter of things and of people observed. Her figures of villagers, artisans, beggars, dancers, etc. evoke quite a world of social atmosphere, of life experience, of the life of the soul, just through some slight, but intimately observed gesture, some almost imperceptible line of the face, a bending of the neck or of a hand, some other gesture or expression, some look, such as life shapes without our ever being conscious of it, so intimately caught that it is never toned down to the average standard of our social conventions nor exaggerated to the "picturesque," but

just such that it speaks for all the throbbing life behind it.2

Magda Maximilianovna Nachman-Acharya died on February 12, 1951, in Bombay, a few hours before the opening of a solo exhibition of her work. In the Times of India, Rudolf von Leyden wrote:

The great little lady of the Bombay art world is no more. As an artist she died in harness … The younger generation of artists in Bombay had in her a faithful friend and understanding critic … They will remember her for her gentleness and for the strength with which she lived through a life that was all but kind to her. And these two qualities, gentleness and strength, speak to us from every painting in this exhibition, which is a fitting memorial to her life's work.3

Acharya (with his back to the viewer) at the posthumous exhibition of Magda. This photograph appeared in the Free Press Bulletin on February 13, 1951.

Magda generously shared the secrets of her craft with younger artists. In the articles that appeared after her death, the bitterness of the loss of a teacher and friend, a deep and subtle artist, and a warm, sympathetic person is deeply felt.

1 Times of India (February 7, 1942)
2 Goetz, "Magda Nachman," Bulletin, 78–83.
3 Times of India, February 13, 1951.