Kanha Babu Goel was born on 2nd September 1930 to a family of grain merchants of Deeg which was at one time capital of Bharatpur state. Kanha Babu went to school in Deeg and was throughout a bright student. As a school boy he was studious, quiet and reserved, more interested in reading, drawing and painting than sports or athletics. The public library in Deeg was right next to his father’s shops in the market place and young Goel would go there whenever he accompanied his father to the shops on school holidays. This is how he started reading newspapers at an early age, becoming aware of things on the national and international scene. It was perhaps the result of this awareness that Goel had from an early age set for himself the goal of becoming an artist. His father did not understand what it was all about but did not oppose him either. After finishing school, Goel aspired to join an art college.

Goel finished high school in 1948. He left the village to seek admission to an art college. Explored Bombay, Agra and Jaipur. Eventually he shifted to Jaipur, but just as he was contemplating taking admission to art college there, someone suggested that before getting down to painting he should first develop his mind, that is, he should study philosophy and theory of aesthetics. This became the turning point in Goel’s life: he gave up the idea of joining an art college and instead did graduation in philosophy. He joined Maharaja’s College in Jaipur which had a strong department of philosophy at the time. Philosophy became his life long passion and art journalism his profession.

Goel had lost his mother at an early age of ten and as the eldest son he was keenly aware of his responsibility towards his family. Therefore, as soon as he felt settled, he brought over his three siblings to Jaipur. He wanted them not only to have better schooling but also to be free from their narrow provincial background. Goel also took up a part time job in a bank to have some extra income with which to finance his own and his sibling’s education. It was hard but Goel had the determination and strength to match all his obligations; his own college, his family and the bank job.

Goel completed graduation in 1951, left Jaipur and moved to Delhi to try his luck at english journalism. He had to struggle hard for several years before he could find a foothold in journalism. In the meantime he did odd jobs like translation and rewriting jobs in order to earn survival money.

In 1953 Goel got his first appointment as a sub editor on the staff of Thought, an English weekly. In 1958 he left Thought to work as assistant publicity officer for All India Cooperative Union. All this while, Goel followed a rigorous routine of studying art history and all the available literature on art. Around 1961, he joined Indian Express as art critic and continued till 1963. During these years he also wrote art reviews for Times of India, Shanker’s Weekly, Commerce and Design magazine.

In 1964 Goel joined Link and Patriot. He was in charge of the art column in Link magazine along with the additional charge of editing magazine section of Patriot. After a couple years he also started writing for Patriot Sunday Magazine, a column on art called Complementarities. After his retirement from Patriot in 1989, Goel wrote long articles on art for Economic Times till 1995.

In his career as an art critic, spanning over fifty years Goel wrote scores of catalogue introductions to the works of various artists, several hundred art reviews and a large number of long articles on art issues for different magazines.

Goel was a self made, self taught man totally committed to art and aesthetics. His intellectual bent of mind, his ardour and independent spirit was so strong that his provincial background was not a hurdle at all. He was a sworn atheist and with his interest in cultural activities, dance, drama, music etc., metropolitan life was just the thing for him. Also, since he was a Marxist at heart, money was never a problem for him. He was happy with whatever little he could earn; he was not a ‘happy hour’ guy and therefore had very few friends. Most of Goel’s life was devoted to reading and writing and collecting books. He owned a vast number of books, on a variety of subjects; philosophy, painting, photography, politics, history, linguistics, Buddhism, Marxism, music, drama, films and so on. He was also fond of collecting fountain pens, cameras and music cassettes of old masters.

Goel was scholarly by nature, read serious stuff, infact, he could never stand anything non serious and unintellectual. When post modernism emerged on the intellectual scene, Goel took to it naturally, understood and approved of it as the valid theoretical base for the philosophy of deconstruction. He greedily collected and read books of great iconoclasts; Nietzsce, Wittgenstein, Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, Freud to name a few. He was also fond of reading Kafka and Russian novelists.

At the time when Goel started writing his art reviews in the sixties, there were not many art critics. Art journalism in India was in its infancy. There were very few art festivals or art symposiums. To put it briefly, Goel was writing at a time of intellectual vacuum as far as art was concerned. There were hardly any artists/critics with whom Goel could share his thoughts and newly emerging theories on art about which he kept on reading in art journals and newly published books on art in the West. It was an uncomfortable situation – there was no challenge, but there was no response either but for Goel, art criticism was a serious endeavor and to it he brought his understanding of aesthetic philosophy, his erudition and a perceptive eye which was perhaps inborn. As an art critic, his effort was to keep clichés out of his writing and give it a philosophical turn.

Goel started writing on art at a time when art world in India was beginning to gain a new kind of vitality. He was a witness to the gradually developing art scenario as someone who recorded and wrote about all the art events. Goel was a well-known figure in the art world of his time and was highly acclaimed and appreciated by discerning artists, art lovers and critics. Goel’s writing being erudite, allusive and philosophical lacks popular appeal and at the time of writing it did not get the kind of importance and wider recognition that it merited.

Geeta Kapoor, writing on Goel as an art critic in the magazine Take (Vol IV issue 15, 2014), says that Goel’s writing needs to be reevaluated and given its proper place. She regrets that for whatever reason, it was not taken seriously at the time of writing and that it was a great loss.

She further writes, “Studying his collected articles, I realize how much K B Goel dared to complicate issues around contemporary art production compared to most others, including Geeta Kapoor, who fancied her ‘proper’ art education as critic. Today when there is a systematic attempt to write the history of Modern and Contemporary Indian Art, K B Goel needs another level of reckoning. Far more than the School of Paris or London, the framework for contemporary criticism was provided by the fierce debate in New York, Goel was reading about these in 1960s and 70s while it all ‘happened’; Clement Greenburg versus the more Marxist-anarchist Harold Rosenburg, Michel Fried versus the minimalists, some of whom were text driven art historians, among them the formidable Rosalind Krause."

Geeta Kapur’s evaluation is that Goel was comparatively speaking ‘far better read in philosophical and aesthetic regimes available in mid 20th century art discourse. Geeta goes on to say that Goel wrote extensively on M F Husain, F N Souza and J Swaminathan. And his unique distinction was that he was the first critic to theorise installation art just as it developed in India in 1990s. He could move into this territory with a certain confidence because he had some thing like philosophical framework for understanding art through the prism of phenomenology. When the time came, he could test his understanding of installation art as form-in-space; and appreciate that the new art practice involved another kind of relationship between the subject, spectator and the art object. Goel wrote extensively about Vivan Sundaram’s installations.

To sum up, Geeta says, “What a fresh perception might do for K B Goel is to recognize that he brought to the understanding of Contemporary Indian Art a peculiar kind of discomfort which is useful as a maker of change.

Finally, says Geeta, " I highlight two things. Goel’s agitated passion in the act of looking and his attempt at a hermeneutical reworking of the ‘truth’ value in art. He was trying at best to search for a method whereby established forms of philosophy come to be unravelled in the practice of art.

Geeta also says at the end of the long article that ‘Being a scholar and a recluse, Goel was never inclined to seek any kind of patronage, publicity or limelight. He never indulged in self promoting tactics and therefore he got only very few prestigious assignments.

In 1986, Goel was a Jury member of the Kalidas Samman, highest national award in visual arts, instituted by Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal. He was invited to participate in seminars at Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal in 1987. Goel covered The Festival of India in France in 1990 and in 1991 he was appointed Indian Commissioner to Havana Biennale.