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Painters in Perspective
A commendable attempt at examining the works of five artist
[[image]] IMAGE AND IMAGINATION-FIVE CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS IN INDIA
By GEETI SEN
Mapin
Pages:176
Price:Rs 1,600
By MADHU JAIN

Geeti Sen has set herself a heady but tricky task: to doggedly track the creative process of five contemporary artists from the first eureka-moment of discovery, through the evolution of a language of expression and forms to, finally, the images themselves. And the paths chosen.
Sen's choice of Meera Mukherjee, Jogen Chowdhury, Manjit Bawa, Arpita Singh and Ganesh Pyne may at the outset seem eclectic, whimsical or plain shrewd: demand exceeds supply in the case of almost all of them and some of them are even famous for being famous.
But the art historian's selection of artists who are apparently not bound by style or ideology has quite a sound basis. All the artists have let their imaginations be fired by traditional styles of Indian painting (miniatures, Kali Path), textiles or tribal sculptures (Bastar in the case of Mukherjee). A visit of stint of study abroad usually triggering the return to the roots journey-revalorising folk art and suffusing it with contemporary relevance.
Moreover, while the concerns of the times may be reflected in their work- albeit indirectly- none of the artists has treated his canvas as a mirror of the world outside. And this despite the fact that the time span covered- late '60s to the mid- '80s- could not have been more tumultuous: the 1971 war, the Emergency, Indira Gandhi's assassination and the 1984 riots, not to speak of the social ferment.
Sen puts it thus: "...as against the cultural hegemony of other artists who respond to the volatile situation of violence and aggression, their work is not politically motivated or treated as commentary... If there were to be any common element shared in their outlook... it is in their inclination to eschew the immediate world of realities."
Eschew it, that is, to be internalised and to be used later at some point in their search for images or forms to express their inner worlds or world views. An event a day or a thousand years old could inspire a work of art. Sen gives the interesting example of Mukherjee's mammoth and heroic sculpture Ashoka at Kalinga-the renunciation of war, at its high tide no less, could not be more relevant for our times.
Similarly, the "ordinary objects",
[[image]]. paintings by Jogen Chowdhury (top)
[[image]]
paintings by Jogen Chowdhury (top); and Arpita Sing: imaginations fired by traditional style

Which form Aripta Singh's painterly vocabulary, metamorphose, but in a world according to Singh, and at her sweet will. Guns and planes, with beady eyes and nasty-looking men, move into her world of fleshy potted plants, women with intricately patterned saris and chairs. And Chowdhury's masterful Tiger in Moonlight- a tiger set against an emptied space-evokes the terror of the Emergency.
What is commendable about Sen is her attempt to examine the works of her subjects in the context of traditional Indian art and discern the parallels. For example, she points out similar patterns or approaches to painting in the canvases of Singh and miniature paintings; between Bawa and the Hill painters; and between Mukherjee's work and the Bastar sculptures.
While Sen enables the reader to ride along for a brief while on the roads of imagination taken by her subjects, she often offloads him brusquely. Passages of insight into the working of the minds of the artists or even her depiction of those rare redefining moments in their work are all too frequently interrupted by large chunks of quotations from art historians and other academics.
It's almost as if she is firing her theories from the shoulders of scholars, instead of totally ingesting her research and then setting forth her arguments cogently. An exercise which unfortunately lets this impeccably produced book- the proofing errors apart- fall between the two stools of a doctoral thesis and a coffee table book on art.
It is a pity, because Sen with her background of Indian art history and her knowledge of Indian miniature paintings- not to say interludes od inspired writing most discernible in the chapter on Pyne- has much to contribute to writing on contemporary Indian art. Especially considering that much of what one reads in the media, or, indeed, books on artists, is either written by amateurs or by jargon-happy scholars.

March 31. 1996 India Today 163