Kanha Babu Goel was born in 1930 to a family of grain merchants from Deeg, Rajasthan. After studying Philosophy at University Maharaja’s College, Jaipur he rose to become a distinguished journalist and art critic from the 1950s, when the Modern Indian Art movement was taking off. He worked for a number of prominent publications until the late 1990s, during which he also wrote for select exhibition catalogues. In this period he was on the juries of the Madhya Pradesh government’s Kalidas Samman 1985 and was also the commissioner of the Indian art pavilion at the 1991 Havanna Biennial.
He wrote extensively on J. Swaminathan (Group 1890) and also on the Progressive Artist Group members, the founder patron of which - Francis Newton Souza – the ‘enfant terrible of Indian art’ - became his great friend and gifted him several works on his visits to Delhi, some of which the artist stated were the finest he had executed. The friendship, respect and admiration extended between the respective families as well. After battling flailing health in his later years, he died in January 2018. A book on his critical writings was posthumously published in 2020.