Ratan Parimoo (b. 1936)
Faculty of Fine Arts, Vadodara, 1973
Prof. Ratan Parimoo, born in 1936 in Srinagar, Kashmir, is a trained painter and a highly respected art historian. His father was a general practitioner and their house was on the banks of the Jhelum river. He was an intelligent student and did brilliantly well in school.
In 1951, he came to Vadodara, at the age of 15, to study painting under N S Bendre at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Baroda. In 1960, he travelled to England on the prestigious Commonwealth Scholarship to study art history.
He was the head of the Department of Art History and Aesthetics at the M S University (1966-91) and carried through his tenure a vision of the discipline as being at the juncture of many allied but somewhat alienated fields. Parimoo was also one of the founder members of Baroda Group and has been instrumental in molding careers and languages of many aspiring artists as well as showing liberalism in art whenever needed. His training in painting and emphasis on the inter-relationship of the arts, history, theories and
research made his teaching unparalleled.
For more than a decade, he served as the Director of the L D Museum and N C Mehta Gallery in Ahmedabad, doing pathbreaking work in the field of art historical research.
He is married to the artist Naina Dalal and lives in Vadodara.