The Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) in Boston is hosting “Divine Color: Hindu Prints from Modern Bengal,” featuring over 100 rare lithographic prints, paintings, sculptures, and textiles depicting Hindu deities. This groundbreaking U.S. exhibition, running from January 31 to May 31, 2026, highlights 19th-century Bengali artists’ innovations in mass-producing vibrant images that reshaped Indian devotion, pop culture, and society.
Exhibition Highlights
Curator Laura Weinstein assembled nearly 40 lithographs from MFA’s unique collection—only two U.S. museums actively acquire these—alongside loans from Delhi’s Tasveer Ghar, tracing prints from late-1800s Kolkata. Affordable depictions of gods like Krishna and Durga democratized sacred art, adorning homes, vehicles, and shops while influencing colonial-era identity.
Cultural Impact
These overlooked prints fueled religious expression amid India’s independence stirrings, evolving into modern calendar art still prevalent globally. A companion MFA catalogue offers scholarly essays and reproductions of 50 lithographs. The show, in the Lois B. Torf Gallery, spotlights lithography’s role in transforming devotional, artistic, and political life.
