Finally, Ganesh Pyne comes to Chennai. Daunting and dark with the threat of death, every piece gleams in characteristic low-key fashion in the city’s first exhibition to showcase Pyne with some degree of detail. The shadows of his art combine well with the playful vivacity of Nandagopal’s sculptures, the other artist on display.
The set of Pynes, sourced from various private collectors, is small but significant. Its most important feature for connoisseurs is the fact that it manages to represent the many stages of the artist’s growth, starting from the early sketches to the powerful temperas, his return to mythology, then the little treasure trove of his ‘jottings’. And, in a delightful aside, a series of sketches made by the artist of Satyajit Ray at work during a shoot, complete with Pyne’s handwritten captions and Ray’s signature. For this alone — this broad glimpse into one of modern India’s most important artists — this exhibition is a rare treat.
A piece that catches the eye is an early sketch, reminiscent of Abanindranath Tagore, of a Bengali bhadralok, which captures in easy, fluid lines his classic dhoti-kurta , the umbrella tucked under one arm, his stoop as he bends to light a cigarette from the end of a smouldering rope, such a familiar sight in tiny paan shops across Calcutta.
A couple of Pyne’s important temperas are on display, one of them being ‘Head and the Black Moon’, with its deeply sad deer head juxtaposed against an ominous black moon in a brooding night sky. Travelling down, the eye suddenly realises that the deer’s body is a mere skeletal cage. Pyne’s paintings are full of these ribcages and rattling bones and hollow skulls — the memories of the dead and the dying he saw during the pre-Partition riots of 1946 in Calcutta when he was barely 10. Those scenes were etched in his memory and he reverts to the idea of death over and over again, grappling with the idea of decay sitting side by side with life.
‘Flower’ is a classic example of this concern. A creature on all fours stoops to smell a flower. What manner of being is this? Sheathed in a transparent shroud, through which a skeleton shimmers, a single disembodied bone for neck, blunt stumps for arms, and then suddenly a large, smooth, well-formed head with shapely ear, almost grotesque in its fleshy life until you see the dead-black eye sockets. The flower this body has crawled towards is a sudden splash of blue with yellow stamens that seem to reach out to the creature — life touching death?
One starkly disturbing figure seems to be death’s handmaiden, wearing a skeleton like a macabre necklace, with its face a white death mask, staring yellow eyes and a mouth of sharp pointed teeth. In one hand is a large bone, and on the head strange headgear that could have belonged to Nefertiti. Pyne’s jottings, those famous doodles he made on graph paper, painstakingly crafting his ideas before committing them to large format, are displayed in a small room on the first floor, along with the Ray series.
Then, there are two temperas from the period when Pyne returned to the Mahabharata for inspiration, both beautiful. One is of Eklavya cutting his thumb off; the other is of Draupadi’s vastraharan .
These connect seamlessly to Nandagopal’s mythology-inspired works, all of which are in small format for this show. The more I see of his work, the more I see a distinct tribal metaphor in his oeuvre — the colours, the metal, the frontal treatment. The impression is strengthened this time by what looks at first sight to be a profusion of insistent, predatory birds with open beaks, often sharp teeth. Kama’s parrot is the gentlest bird in the collection. ‘The Musicians’, with two perched atop a tree and one standing beneath, is a phenomenal piece of work. Balance, colour, texture — they make for a perfect composition.
Here, then, are two artists who consciously distanced themselves from their pasts to try and find their own signature style. One found it in a dark surrealism, the other in mythic imagination, but both broke the rules of their times and their schools.
Curator Pradipta Mohapatra must be given credit for managing to put together this show, which he calls Two Schools, Two Masters. It is a pity it had to be held at IIT’s Alumni Centre, which is certainly not ideal for art. The lighting is poor on some paintings, the display broken unevenly across rooms, and even a small crowd makes it a cramped experience. But this, I suppose, is the small price one must pay for the pleasure of seeing Pyne in Chennai.
