JAMINI ROY (1887 – 1972 ) Jamini Roy’s paper or canvas is like a stage on which he methodically distributes his characters- everything is rigid and yet somehow supple. There is directness to the stance, his images with wide open fish eyes are confident in the roles they play and quite free of any tinge of self-consciousness. This , then betokens the Classical or epic touch… Though very competent in Western Academic style, in the early phase he painted many European subjects like Landscapes and Portraits. Later he chose his theme from the people around him. Jamini Roy’s inspiration then became wholly Indian, his choice of subjects rich, varied and inexhaustible as he painted the tribes and sects of his native district, villagers at work or playing, colourful animals in gay abandon like the wondrous abstractions of toy-makers. His themes being ancestral and indigenous, the authenticity of his localness makes him stand out from many other Indian artists. Jamini Roy painted all universally beloved subjects of the Bengalis, though he founded his idiom on the pattern of Bengal pata-painting initially, but eventually he enriched and embellished it with elements assimilated from the great traditions of Egyptian Murals & Byzantine Mosaics. He transformed the village style by an intellectual simplification. The essence to which he reduced his structures look like folk forms, are as much assimilated, into the realms of an inner coherence of the picture frame, brooded over and realized by the artist from the compulsion of a new kind of spatial imagination. The first new quality to emerge after a long period of formal experiment was a rhythm and sense of poise which achieved its fullest expression in the monumental lyricism of Jamini Roy’s early panels with Vaishnava themes — Drawn with unswerving lines with exact and accurate colouring to match his purpose, they are summary accounts in our folk medieval tradition of Human form. The work of Jamini Roy is replete with latent vigour, as his paintings are pure realizations of form executed to fulfill a disciplined artistic intention with a high sense of artistic responsibility. Apart from the mythological scenes from Ramayana and Krishnaleela, Gods and Goddesses, it was the village cultivators, the carpenters, blacksmiths, Santhal men and women, the ecstatic dancing of women , animals, Fakirs and Vaishnava singers that he mainly painted. In Jamini Roy’s paintings, a figure or an animal or any ornamental motif cannot be understood at its face value. Jamini Roy transforms his objects and figures with the intention of uncovering a stream of experiences and sentiments shared by the community, which is an evidence of the insidious triumph of Folk Imagination over the orthodox mind Christ appeared in his paintings in a novel structural form typical of Jamini Roy’s style with undifferentiated bodies, large eyes and beard protruding from the head, as he tried to assimilate the human and divine character into one by abstract symbolic means of folk art tradition, thus portraying the scintillating effect of the Byzantine mosaics in tempera method. Jamini Roy’s paintings on Christ reflect a comingling of the mercy and grace of Vaisnavism along with deep emotive appeal of the Byzantine and Russian icons.
RABINDRANATH TAGORE ( 1861 – 1941 ) ‘ Art belongs to the region of intuition, the unconscious, the superfluous…..’ he wrote. Tagore was an inspirer of the Indian Nationalist Revival in painting and an expounder of Asian Cultural coherence. Though predominantly literary in nature, the rich and numerous gifts of this man of genius encompassed the cultural life of the nation and the world. Whichever region of human feeling, thought and action he chose, the form and the content of his prolific contributions were remarkably consistent in their development. His intuition of a balanced, harmonious, and basically poetic aesthetics had moulded every orientation of his personality. Spiritual values, world order, national education, even the way he dressed or spoke all seemed to breathe the same feeling for a tranquil and exalted aesthetic rightfulness. Rabindranath’s pictorial output is not that of a disturbed soul agonized by the social chaos and upheavals. It can be observed that in his visual work the tragedy is pacified, calmness of the soul is retained, inspite of the bursts of innate creative energy. There is vivacity yet combined with dignity, perhaps therein lies the Indian quality of his paintings. Both the physiognomic distortions and grimacing expressions emerge automatically by the movement of the pen or brush, by moving it in jerks or in delicate curves, resulting in a long protruding nose or a wide mouth. It is not that he was not interested in a beautiful face, but on the whole it can be said that he was not primarily interested in the beautiful but in the grosteque... This is another point that brings home the fact that he was essentially as imagist concerned with a forceful, telling image. If the ‘ drop and loop ’ is one seed element of pictorial form, it plays its part in a linear and bounded manner, or in a painterly way. The former constructs a conclusive visual unit displayed on a monochrome ground, in one plane or, with such foreshortening as the curves of the drop-shape suggest. These lead to consciously utilized, three dimensional relations between the bounded drop shapes. Into some of them, facial features are seen so that they constitute a cheek and nose, an ear, a deeply set eye and a beret, titled at an angle. The form of the drop suggest that produces, by the conscious association and assimilation the shape of eye, nose, beret and the like as also other curves which help to conclude the Face. Such constructed faces and the other shapes produced by the original form inpulsion are firmly delinated Rabindranath Tagore was an institution born in Bengal He is a lore that still drives the inner spirits of Bengalis. They had no ethnic dance form--he gave them Rabindra Nritya, Rabindranath Tagore gave them Rabindra Sangeet--a new genre of songs that plumbed the depths of Bengali sensitivity. Paintings poetry, novels, drama, travelogues, essays, limericks-they flowed freely from his prolific pen. The mass and variety of his works are so overwhelming, it is impossible to choose a favourite or be partial to any of them. Rabindranath Tagore wrote ‘Lines and colours in art no carriers of information; they seek their rhythmic incarnation in pictures. Their ultimate purpose is not to illustrate or to copy some outer fact or inner vision, but to evolve a harmonious wholeness which finds its passage through our eyesight into imagination. It neither questions our mind for meaning nor burdens it with unmeaningness, for it is, above--all meaning...’ Interesting are the projected imagery of his works-- composite flower-birds, peaceful promenades, distraught angular pilgrims, sardonic imps, romantic houses, lovers, masks of sarcasm, masks of terror, characters and portraits, incandescent landscapes, delicate oval moon-faces of sentimental women with silent lips and with eyes to transfix... Though striking evening landscapes recurred, but boldly treated head studies predominated. The pensive, ovoid face of a woman with large unwavering soulful eyes was perhaps a more obsessive theme than any other. The angular, geometric faces and figures as if held in a dynamic suspensive tension... all reflect on his inner journey and the fantasy of his emotional world.
PARITOSH SEN ( born 1918 ) Paritosh Sen is an artist of the 1940’s generation whose modernist sensibility has unfolded itself through continuous dialectics between his artistic self and society, and also between his passion for pictorial form and structure and his zest for strongly impacted figurative imagery. Paritosh Sen though started painting in the manner of the Bengal school tradition in 1936, training under the famous artist D. P. Roy Chowdhary in Madras, but he was soon disillusioned in Bengal school. He later came to Indore in 1940 as a teacher at Daly College, and further returned to Calcutta in 1942. The Santhal life in Santiniketan fascinated him and this, rather than the mythological and the historical themes of the Bengal school caught his interest and from here came the break as he painted more and more from real life. Then the turning point came with the Famine and so much anguish which was man - made, when Indian involvement began in World War II….and his concern was to evolve a certain language to represent that crisis. Paritosh Sen believes that mostly it is the inner world of the artist which has been expressed so the simple idea of reacting to the outside world through the inner eye became’ me ‘ so after coming back to Calcutta in 1954 from Europe, roaming in the by-lanes of Calcutta he found inspiration in the tremendous vigour amongst the people .Back home surrounded by his own, his work took another turn with the new vision he had acquired. Pavement series by Paritosh Sen came at this period of return…just seeing rickhawala’s after a whole day of hard labour, sitting with drums and singing until midnight, seeing this tremendous hope in people, Paritosh found his work to be taking on new forms and dimensions. Men and women cutting across all walks of life have come under his witty, critical and incisive gaze, stimulating contrary and complex emotions of fun and fervour or love and hatred. He watches them with ironic detachment or bridges the gap between his self and the other, or like a voyeur, when the subject is a woman , focuses his feasting or jesting eye on the gestures of the sensuous curves. As some of his work has been termed as caricature -- Paritosh Sen says both caricature and serious are like two parallel streams in his work, and there is no contradiction between them, as its like our own nature…like the two sides of a coin .Like love and hatred…, for love takes the form of hatred in so many stages, but just as a temporary feeling. Paritosh Sen says I want to paint in a certain language which would help me express my ideas as forcefully as I want, because the forces around me are so dynamic that it can brook no static expression…
NANDALAL BOSE ( 1882 – 1966 ) Nandalal Bose belonged to a class to which tradition had always been more real than the immediate reality. To convey the traditional, the mythological mode of thought, he used wash as the main medium or the simple watercolour, the line sketches and drawings, paper cuttings bringing out the elemental truth of life and nature…sight of a simple tree, a santhal family, a landscape, a tea shop anything around him aroused his imagination Mythology had been the dominating influence on Nandalal’s imagination in his early age and this naturally made him susceptible to the fascination of Traditional Indian Art. Nandalal Bose studied under Abanindranath Tagore at Santiniketan and was his most recognized and talented pupil. The major contribution of Nandalal Bose to the Indian art of his time period was that he reasserted the importance of form. Nature was the matrix of form and it was to nature that Nandalal turned when he had outgrown the literary bias and romanticism of the early Bengal School. The past to him was a source of principles and ideas, it had an artistic grammar that was a discipline for hand and eye….It was in his drawings that he revealed his empathy for the living world and his personality in full and demonstrated his ability to combine the representational and the decorative into a single image with ease. Nandalal’s attitude towards nature, as reflected in his last works, is distinct from the approach of European landscape painters. He does not necessarily choose moods of nature or atmospheric effects. He based his images on personal feelings aroused by nature and its physical form, his brush work approximates the forms of visible things empirically experienced….Though Nandalal Bose earlier envisaged Gods and Godesses as being above everyday life and things visible, his later work however revealed humbly that he sought Godliness in the sky, water and mountains and in plants, animals and human beings. This concept was derived from Chinese philosophy. As an artist, teacher, theorist and designer Nandalal was a creative person and his influence on the Indian art and design scene has been far-reaching.
GAGANENDRANATH TAGORE ( 1867 – 1938 ) It was Gaganendranath Tagore who built up the Indian Society of Oriental Art –the great and inspiring centre of a new National awakening in an understanding of the ideals and basic principles of Indian art , which has now flowered out in exquisite blossoms in all parts of India. This leader of the modern movement in Indian Art spread the message of ‘Indianness in Indian Art’ which helped to protect a self-forgetful Nation to find itself and to recover its spiritual soul by struggling against the dominations of foreign aggressions. Gaganendranath Tagore has been known as a prolific and versatile artist of daring originality. A non –conformist, art to him was an intensely subjective and almost personal experience. Artistic motivation by Gaganendranath Tagoe was a curious amalgam of deliberate intellection, penetrated and surcharged by romanticism of the emotional - impulsive type as his inspiration was psychological rather than artistic. His preoccupation was more with the emotional and ideological significance of things than with the material aspects of form and structure. His earliest studies were a series of daring brush drawings of crows, memory drawings of exquisite charm and of novel and fascinating realism, and he leapt to fame as far back as 1911. The greatest contribution of G. N. Tagore’s cubism lay in his dynamic rendering of light by skilful manipulation of diverse values of dark and white surfaces of cubes, from which emanated a forceful presentation of the phenomenon of light with an actuality and realism. His presentation of light gives one a real feeling of light…its vibration and illumination, its pulsation power and its suggestion of heat, together with a feeling of space without the formula of perspectives. He never yielded to the temptation of breaking up forms, but stuck to an original method of synthetic Cubism in which diverse facets of a subject were skillfully woven in intriguing and dynamic patterns…. Gaganendranath though was a master of beautiful geometric composition, his work should yet be characterized, not as aesthetic in the absolute sense, but as emotive…. As his mind was fixed on creating psychological values through visual forms rather than on creating forms for their own sake….with all these effects he induces a romantic mood in us. On account of sheer facility this quality sometimes degenerated into sentimentality in his later work… Gaganendranath was as much inspired by nature as by the scenes of Calcutta. He painted the boundless rice fields, the temple on the river, the rows of palms and coconut trees, hills shrouded in storm and mist, village in the evening, punting boatman, with same skill as Himalayan landscapes bathed in the glory of light or human types. It was from Japanese that he learnt the technique of using brush and ink and mastered it by getting right visual effects from the ink and the tactual qualities from the brush, clearly showing the contrast between the visible and the invisible. Gaganendranath, through his experimental play with brush and colour, captured the charming capriciousness of refracted light. Light, as it passes through prism, is broken up, refracted and consequently, amusing aspects of the visible world are revealed through the medium of objective likeness. The brightness of radiating colour in these paintings is charming. Such clear expression of visual inspiration is rare in modern art. Bits of crystal – like forms are composed in his art to reveal a new world of colour and beauty, and gradually through an amalgamation of reality and imagination, he succeeded in creating an atmosphere as delightful as in any fairy tale. Rabindranath Tagore wrote this poem in Aug 1938 for Gaganendranath, when he passed away…. You ranged from shore to shore of colour and line, you were merged deep in the very heart of Beauty. The boat of you life has now passed beyond line’s bourn, to the pure white mystery of the viewless Form Through an amalgamation of the concrete and the abstract, he produced an art, the originality of which has indicated a new way in the sphere of abstract art. If we judge him against the background of International Art, we shall have no difficulty in seeing originality of his art and in appreciating his historical importance. Ganganendranath Tagore paintings are suffused by the veriest essence of romance, the sublimation even of dreams and fairy tales whose spirit passes before us in ethereal and disembodied emanation. As in our dream, the feeling of weightlessness and the restless flow of distinct or indistinct scenes withers away as we approach the barrier of wakefulness, similarly the creations of Gaganendranath hardly ever touch the conscious experience of the viewers.
M.F.HUSAIN
(Born- 1915)
Maqbool Fida Husain has received National & International recognition in abundance
and is undoubtedly
one of the most treasured artists of India.
He is among those few modern artists who have focused on Mythological and epic narratives, and for over five decades, he has painted themes from our epics in literally thousands of paintings and drawings which shows his passion for these narratives and also of his deep understanding of Indian Culture. Husain is a man of acute sensibilities, widely traveled, civilized and a product of Present India.
His is a humane art, an ART OF COMPASSION and understanding.
It has an intellect and passion….capable of joys and sorrows..
It is an art of utmost significance in Contemporary Indian Painting.
Husain weilds a quick, nervous line of great sensitiveness and energy…it is a versatile line of both power and poetry which pounds across a canvass in his horses, lurks in women’s faces in a tender, almost tentative hint or threads sharply across his compositions like a scalpel, separating one figure, one face, from the other in subtly differentiated tones of colour, as though he sculpted his figures from paint.
His paintings are evidence of his astonishing capacity to absorb the entire culture of a region, whether it is Kerala, Rajasthan, Andhra Pradesh, Haryana or Benaras. That is why his paintings reflect an amalgam of The Indian cultural climate that is - the architectural style, costume, colour, texture, rhythm, legend and a folk expression peculiar to it.
Husain has painted portraits, murals,landscape, nudes, benaras ghats, profane birds, musical notations, twinkling elephants, primeval horses……he is a fluent painter and when the mood takes him his output is considerable. There is great diversity in what he paints, diversity of both mood and manner.
.
The Indian Civilization, in all its diversity, has been Husain’s basic inspirational
project.
Posterity will certainly name Husain as one of the most prominent post-Independence artists to shape the contemporary in the spirit of a living and changing tradition. More than any other modern artist in India, he has understood how a syncretic
Husain has been signal in leading Indian Art into the Contemporary world, and is such an iconic figure that this is the most opportune and crucial time to honour him for his courage and dedication to the cultural renaissance of his beloved country.
RAMKINKAR BAIJ ( 1910—1980 ) Ramkinkar Baij as a boy painted curtains for the local theatre, inspired by the work of his village craftsmen, he also painted posters for the Nationalist protesters .Seeing his natural talent Ramananda Chatterjee, Nationalist leader and art connoisseur sent him to Shantiniketan for further grooming. There he first came under the influence of Nandalal Bose and Abanindranath Tagore, but gradually he developed an individual perception and played an important role in Shantiniketan’s progression from pan-Asianism towards an art open to Western Modernism, though containing the local experiences within. The sensuous elegance of the Santhal tribals and their infective gaiety and good nature impressed him greatly, as also the people and things in the Ashram environment .His intentions in painting went beyond making an aesthetic or emotional document, rising above and beyond the visual stimulus. Though he started each painting with a certain personal experience, which was often emotionally loaded, but day after day he fed and nurtured it with other experiences to build it into an independent entity…..so the object source underwent changes though many metamorphic states. It can be said that in 1940’s his post-cubist formal explorations gave way to expressionist fragmentation and abstraction, which in late forties became more allegorical and still later more narrative Ramkinker’s paintings can be classified into a few categories. Some of them are individualized portraits, each personal and unique….they are not polished masks which most professionals paint, nor are they just character studies-- because they turn each subject to the level of an icon, with an individual canon of its own. There are paintings with more involved imagery like the landscapes with the Siris tree or the bizarre quasi-cubist woman, mother and child, or the romantic groups of female figures between trees. In each such case the simple source-themes build up to the dimensions of an allegory or mythical abstraction. The village in storm is developed into a moody abstraction, with the serpentine glow of the flashes of lightning edging the night-bound roofs. Even the reapers and threshers have a kind of epic dimension. Apart from these there are paintings in which he robustly draws his local environment, a village in a storm, a girl leading a goat against strong evening wind, farm labourers at work and rest, builders, reapers….. all painted with few random patches of colour that are given representational accentuation with a calligraphic economy that looks deceptively spontaneous but captures his subjects with remarkable precision.
PROKASH KARMAKAR ( born 1933 ) Prokash Karmakar had always wanted his imagination to stir his skill .His paintings from the outset of his career have been a contemplation of life, a rendering of experience in artistic terms…Men and women are shown in their vulnerability and their capability to struggle to tragic heights. Human suffering is the central theme, but is never glorified…..Women ,men, animals, birds and inanimate objects appear in motion or writhe in agony on his canvasses. They are full of personal peculiarities and gestures….Vultures appeared to prey on pretty women. Profound and bright imageries dominate his works of this period. Karmakar paintings appear to connect to his remembrance of his past, some of the subjects seem very personal, still others are recollected from racial memory—archetypal content picked up from nightmares rather than dreams, and some are from the darkest moments of human history .In his earlier and even in later black and white drawings ,with shades of one or more colours he has used the female form as a symbol of vulnerability. Which often show the shocking disintegration of a female nude, as if in agony almost falling apart…His horses also seem to squirm like a worm responding to the tormented nude with raised hands. The compositions of each is well balanced and colours aflame with a strange rawness…. Karmakar has also painted lush tropical Landscapes in all their natural glory, depicting different Indian seasons…the moonlit and moonless nights. Even in their slight distortion and elongation—they are poetic in exuberance…with wild grass and the ever changing moods of the sky, and has successfully turned them into dreamscapes…..
©copyright2005, artchill.com