Painting Competition

Beginning with the Indian government’s support of Mithila artists in the late 1960s, a growing number of the region’s residents began to paint professionally in response to the medium’s potential to generate income. As the title of this work indicates, we are seeing here a local painting competition. Mahasundari Devi completed this painting nearly twenty years before the Mithila Art Institute was established.

Here, boys and girls are intent at their work; the girls work inside their homes and the boys in open courtyards. Older women supervise and guide the young artists. All work on sheets of paper instead of on walls, the traditional surfaces for paintings. This suggests the shift of focus and function of painting in Mithila society from ritual and personal to salable art.