Paritosh Sen: -
Born 1918. Founder member of Calcutta Group 1942. Teacher, Institute of Painting Technology, Jadavpur. Participated in Commenwealth Arts Festival, 1965. Sao Panlo Biennale, 1965. And National Exhibition of Art, New Delhi, lived and worked in Paris 1949-54 and in 1962-63. Awarded Rockefeller 3rd Grant in 1970-71.
Paritosh Sen is the artist of the 1940’s generation whose modernist sensibility has unfolded itself through continuous dialectics between his artistic self and society, and also between the passion of the pictorial form and structure and his zest for his strongly impacted figurative imagery.
He though started painting in the manner of 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 in Daly College, further returned to Calcutta in 1942. Santhal Life is 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 anguish which was man – made, when Indian involvement began in the World War II….and his concern was to evolve a certain language to represent that crisis.
He 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 India in 1954 from Europe, roaming in the by – lanes of the Calcutta he found inspiration in tremendous vigour amongst the people. Back home surrounded by his own, his work to another turn with the new vision he had acquired. His Pavement series came at this period of return… just seeing rickhawala’s after a whole day of hard labour, sitting with drums and singing until mid night, seeing this tremendous hope in people, he found his work to be taking on new forms and dimensions.
Men and women cutting across all works 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 women, focuses his feasting or jesting eye on the gestures of the sensuous curves.
As some of his works has been termed as caricature – he 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 the coin. Like love and hatred…, for love takes the form of hatred in so many stages but just as temporary feelings. He 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 …
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