Ask artist Jogen Chowdhury what he feels about being called the Master of Unbroken Lines, there is a good chance his reply will surprise you. “I am not happy,” he says, shrugging his shoulders to emphasise his discomfort. “Master of Unbroken Lines is not a serious phrase. Art is more than just unbroken lines.”

We are sitting in one of the smaller rooms behind the office of the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), well-known in Bengaluru for its sylvan settings. At 76, the spry Jogen da , dressed in a blue cotton kurta, white pyjamas and the ubiquitous embroidered  jhola , is overseeing the unpacking of more than 200 works that have come from Kolkata and Hyderabad. These are to be mounted for a retrospective in the city titled ‘Compelling Presence’. About 90 per cent of the works are from his collection and the rest have been sourced from private collectors. The works span the past six decades and the show is testimony to his prolific artistic career. Jyotirmoy Bhattacharya, co-curator of the show, points out that Chowdhury is not just an important artist; he is the “face of Indian art”.

Even his early watercolours and drawings, like the ones he did at the Ecole Nationale Superieur des Beaux Arts in Paris as a student in 1965, command attention. The men who are unpacking the works pause for a few minutes to take a look at the six-feet-long drawing titled ‘Abu Ghraib’. He made it as a reaction to the torture and abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. While the gaunt form is in despair, the lines are overpowering. They run from end-to-end without faltering and the drawing has a painterly quality. “Some of the best artists like Van Gogh poured their entire magnificent energy onto the canvas through the tip of the brush. For me, the vibrations in my body come out as the line.”

As the wooden crates are pried open and the works unveiled from layers of bubble wrap, it is easy to see why he is considered one of the most important figures in Indian contemporary art. The New York Times , in a review of his works displayed in a group show in 2002 in New York, called him an exceptional satirist.

Born in Bangladesh, Chowdhury remembers the trauma of Partition and the subsequent displacement of his family from a small village in the erstwhile East Bengal to the city of Kolkata. From the beginning, he says, his thoughts were on serious matters. He remembers wondering about infinity as a class VI student — imagining a wall half-way across the universe and wondering what lay beyond it. “I was preoccupied with the concept of infinity,” he says. As a teenager, he would go to The Indian Museum in Kolkata and stand in front of a sculpture of Buddha and be “hypnotised by its meditative force.”

Force, transcendence, meditative, supernatural — these are the words he uses to explain art. “I will try to keep it simple,” he warns, before embarking on the exposition. “When something has been created out of something and the creative mind infuses it with a transcendental quality, making it out-of-the-world, sublime, meditative, or even supernatural, that is art,” he says. “The beholder should be able to enjoy it with a feeling that is of a higher nature.”

“Difficult to write, is it not,” he asks with a twinkle. For Chowdhury, art is not just painting. “I find art in music, in structures, in simple things like how the Japanese keep their homes.” It’s this creativity that has been the catalyst for his foray into poetry, textile designing, and photography. “When I get involved in something, it has to be in-depth. I have a serious mind.” His wife, Shipra Chowdhury, who has been sitting quietly beside him, can’t resist smiling. “When he is in front of the computer, or is painting or writing, he forgets about time,” she says. “I have to force him to eat.”

Chowdhury has written extensively on art, on art understanding and aesthetics. In one of his essays on art appreciation, he drew a diamond and divided it into three parts. The uppermost portion depicted sensitive people — such as Aurobindo, Tagore, Einstein — who understood art. The middle portion was for the average man with a bit of understanding of art.

“The majority of people like popular things, which is not wrong,” he says. The third portion was meant for those who do not get art at all. “Understanding art is inherent in a person,” he explains. “For those who don’t get it, (art) education will just act as a cover-up.”

Chowdhury’s works have been influenced by several factors. When in Paris, he played Western classical music which suited his mental state then. As the music reverberated “outwards”, his works merged towards abstraction.

Back in India, he worked as a textile designer in Chennai and was later curator at Rashtrapati Bhavan for 15 years (1972-87). For a long time, he played Indian classical music, which “coils inwards” and his subsequent works reflected that. Today, Chowdhury doesn’t play any music while painting. “I am not a religious person,” he says, while also dismissing notions of the ‘mind’ and ‘heart’. He believes that one reacts with the brain. Still, nature instils a sense of wonderment, and when he looks at a flower, its colour and form, he is sure there is a bigger force at play. Philosophy, then, becomes another point of influence. As does real life.

He points to a satirical painting of a couple — a potbellied politician and a voluptuous woman with bare breasts — and says a scandal involving a politician from Odisha triggered it. “There is no fun in direct statements; the fun is in suggestion.” Apparently, the politician’s face is that of his attendant in Rashtrapati Bhavan. His wife shakes her head in loving exasperation.

Chowdhury made a strong statement against Emergency — his famous painting ‘Tiger in the Moonlight’ is allegorical and mocking. Still, he admired Indira Gandhi. “She had a keen sense of aesthetics and took special interest in the art displayed at Rashtrapati Bhavan. When important guests like the Queen of England or the Shah of Iran visited, she personally chose the art to be displayed.”

His home in Shantiniketan is the hub of all matters art, where artists come in droves to visit Chowdhury. No one is sent away without a meal. Chowdhury has recently started an art magazine called ArtEast and, as the chairperson of Rajya Charukala Parshad, he has been the catalyst for books and art shows. He buys the works of young artists to encourage them.

Walking around the small room in NGMA and taking in the works stacked against the walls, Chowdhury talks of his plans to open a museum in Kolkata for his private collection. He is confident it will happen soon. Then he pauses near a table. One of the drawings placed on it has a piece of broken glass inside the frame. “While reframing, that piece was not removed.” He laughs at the irony of a broken glass encased within the drawing of unbroken line. It is a sign to change that title. “Maybe you can think of something else?” 

Jayanthi Madhukar is a freelance writer who believes that everything has a story waiting to be told.

On view Compelling Presence,

10 a.m. – 5 p.m.,

April 22 – May 22,

National Gallery of Modern Art, Bengaluru. 

Source : The Hindu

An exhibition at NGMA brings to life the idiosyncrasies of Amrita Sher-Gil

By : SHIKHA KUMAR

On the second floor of National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), Kala Ghoda, two paintings hanging close to each other stand out. One depicts a bride’s chamber before her wedding as she gets ready, flanked by her friends. In the other are six young men, with bare torsos, their stark white dhotis in contrast with their dark brown skin. Titled Bride’s Toilet and Brahmacharis respectively, these artworks — part of Amrita Sher-Gil’s famous trilogy — have one thing in common, the large mournful eyes of their subjects.

These two paintings, perhaps, encapsulate what Sher-Gil is today best remembered for. “The trilogy showed the grace and nobility of ordinary folk. Sher-Gil was enthralled by common people, their beauty, sadness and struggles,” says Yashodhara Dalmia, the author of Amrita Sher-Gil: A Life.
Art historian Dalmia recently conducted a gallery walk of late artist Amrita Sher-Gil’s paintings as part of a show at NGMA in commemoration of the birth centenary of the late artist, born in Hungary to Sikh father and a Hungarian Jewish mother. The collection of 95 paintings belongs to NGMA in Delhi and has made its way to the city after a showing at NGMA, Bangalore.

A celebrated artist today, Sher-Gil’s ideas and expressions were thought of as isolated, especially for a woman, back in her time. “Her paintings about India depicted people in their true, gritty form and not in a sunny disposition,” says Dalmia, of Sher-Gil’s work after she moved to India in 1934. The Nawab Salar Jung of Hyderabad as well as the Maharaja of Mysore had chosen other artists’ works over Sher-Gil’s.
 However, Pandit Nehru was one of the few who recognised its free-flowing and cosmopolitan nature.
 Sher-Gil’s art was recognised only after her death in 1941, at 28 years. “She ushered in a way of expressing contemporary reality through modern art, something very few artists depicted,” says Dalmia.
 Her Indian paintings, rooted in colour, however, were a complete change of palette from her days in Paris, where the influence of European art styles shows in her paintings, such as Young Girls, which led to her election as an Associate of the Grand Salon in Paris in 1933. Young Girls depicts her younger sister Indira and her friend Denise facing each other. “The painting showcases a stark contrast between the cultures, the dark and the fair, and is a result of Sher-Gil’s desire to show the fusion of the East and the West, an environment she grew up in,” says Dalmia.

Sher-Gil’s fascination with the physicality of humans is evident in her nudes, many of which adorn the first floor of the gallery space. The attention to detail in the contours of the female body and in the faces of women looking away, shows that Sher-Gil didn’t want their persona to be fixed and
formulated but open to development, says Dalmia. The floor also features Sher-Gil’s self-portraits that show her vivacious, flamboyant self with dark lips and flowing hair. There’s also a painting of Marie Louise Chessany, who many believe Sher-Gil was involved with.

The exhibition also features photographs of Sher-Gil and a rare collection of her letters to art critics like Karl Khanadalavala. For art critic Ranjit Hoskote, who holds Sher-Gil in the league of Rabindranath Tagore and Jamini Roy, the exhibition brings her works to an audience that may not have see them before. “Sher-Gil has been a foundational figure for decades now. I wouldn’t say a showing like this aims to restore her acclaim, but in fact celebrates her as an artist,” says Hoskote.