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Lot 42

 

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“Whether I’m realistic, naturalistic or surreal, I do not know. It may be a combination of attitudes and techniques.”
- BIKASH BHATTACHARJEE

Born in 1940, Bikash Bhattacharjee honed his skills in academic realism at the Indian College of Arts and Draftsmanship, Calcutta. He studied a variety of Indian and Western masters, including Abanindranath Tagore, Hemendranath Mazumdar, Rembrandt, Goya, Manet, Renoir, Munch, and Bacon,... “Whether I’m realistic, naturalistic or surreal, I do not know. It may be a combination of attitudes and techniques.”
- BIKASH BHATTACHARJEE

Born in 1940, Bikash Bhattacharjee honed his skills in academic realism at the Indian College of Arts and Draftsmanship, Calcutta. He studied a variety of Indian and Western masters, including Abanindranath Tagore, Hemendranath Mazumdar, Rembrandt, Goya, Manet, Renoir, Munch, and Bacon, each of which contributed to his humanistic vision. However, rather than imitating their styles, they were “absorbed honestly and with attention to the techniques and imagery, a sensitive identification which was quietly transposed onto local reality and moods.” (Marta Jakimowicz-Karle, Bikash Bhattacharjee, Bangalore: Kala Yatra, 1991, p. 5)

Calcutta was the primary inspiration for Bhattacharjee, whose works personified the turbulent socio-political scenario, struggle, death, and decay that he witnessed in the city as a young child during the Partition and in the ensuing decades. Though rooted in academic realism, the artist’s works are enveloped in a patina of strangeness, imparted through the distortion or erasure of features, surreal symbolism, and a mysterious colour palette, which lend layers of meaning to the painting. “His stylistic stand is thus poised somewhere between realism and the outer limits of surrealism. With his constant preoccupation with social realities, Bikash has little taste for digging out from deep within his individual self some dubious forms and figures for a surrealist construct of the unconscious.” (Manasij Majumder, “Scripting Social Reality,” Close to Events: Works of Bikash Bhattacharjee, New Delhi: Niyogi Books, 2007, p. 229)

Likening himself to a photojournalist, Bhattacharjee believed in not just conveying an identifiable reality but telling an evocative story, as evident in the present lot. “The structural clarity of his imagery often recalls frames from the films by the legendary Satyajit Ray...in many of his portrait-based images the characters come under the probing gaze of the artist the way in which in an intense psychological moment the camera indulgently lingers on the protagonist in the middle shot of a feature film frame. ‘The scene in front of you,’ [he says] like a single frame in a film, ‘is part of a larger one. You know something that has just happened and that there is more to follow.’” (Manasij Majumder, “Bikash Bhattacharjee,” Amit Mukhopadhyay ed., Bikash Bhattacharjee: A Retrospective, Kolkata: Emami Chisel Art, 2009, p. 15)

A triptych, the present work depicts women (who were a frequent subject of the artist’s works) and children standing by a balcony, surrounded by a seemingly otherworldly natural environment. The balcony is reminiscent of the crumbling palatial homes that Bhattacharjee often spent hours observing and incorporated into his paintings. “A pervasive serenity prevails now showing human figures and nature in a tender directness but also unearthing a mysterious, even eerie sense of their archaic unity.” (Jakimowicz-Karle, p. 41) While in the first panel, the woman and child have been painted in a realist style, in the next, the woman assumes an iconic stance reminiscent of the depiction of deities in Indian miniatures and Early Bengal oils. With the details left vague, the latter appears ghost-like. In the third panel, the artist skillfully uses colour to distort the figure’s features and create a sense of unease.

The present work also exemplifies Bhattacharjee’s mastery over his craft through which he created compelling canvases that conveyed not merely social reality but also his unique insight as an artist. “It was between his willing submission to the rigours and discipline of craft and the creative drive that let his art etch and contour the unique personality of the artist. And this dialectic worked wonders in all his great canvases whatever be the medium, oil or water colour, crayon or charcoal, all of which he handled with the energy and finesse of an old master. The primary appeal of each of his masterpieces, even to the lay viewer, is the masterly execution of the image-its edgy surface, smooth, bristly or weighty brushwork, details of textural or tonal wonders, mimetic vividness or expressional intensity and the neat tidy structure even when the image is teasingly oblique or obscurely enigmatic or hermetically fashioned.” (Majumder, Mukhopadhyay ed., p. 15)

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