Important Notice

“One has to marry the subconscious feeling and bring it to some clarity and logical shape- so that it exists outside you. This sums up the endeavour of my artistic practice.” - GANESH PYNE

Ganesh Pyne’s artistic vocabulary was profoundly shaped by his own experiences of alienation arising from the pain and horror he witnessed during decades of political turbulence in Kolkata, including the 1946 communal riots during the Partition;... “One has to marry the subconscious feeling and bring it to some clarity and logical shape- so that it exists outside you. This sums up the endeavour of my artistic practice.” - GANESH PYNE

Ganesh Pyne’s artistic vocabulary was profoundly shaped by his own experiences of alienation arising from the pain and horror he witnessed during decades of political turbulence in Kolkata, including the 1946 communal riots during the Partition; the Naxal insurgency of the 1960s; and the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War. This was deepened by the great sense of loss he felt at the death of many loved ones, notably his father and elder brother whom he had been close to. Pyne’s art became a way for him to express this private inner turmoil, and his works are marked by a fascination with death and decay. His fertile imagination was also fed by tales with macabre imagery, drawn from the Mahabharata, Ramayana and Bengali folklore, which his grandmother narrated to him as a child.

Pyne developed his own personal symbolism and built allegorical worlds populated by wounded gladiators, dying kings, wandering saints, weapons, and skeletal forms. The present lot features a mysterious, dreamlike composition centring an illuminated saint-like figure, possibly an interpretation of the 16th-century Vaishnava saint Chaitanya Mahaprabhu. As a child, Pyne would create and worship cardboard cutouts of Krishna, Radha, Chaitanya and his disciple Nityananda based on the idols he saw at the small temple that stood in front of his home. The temple was damaged during the 1946 riots and the image of Chaitanya was disfigured. “In course of time I chased him, made him into a mental icon,” said Pyne. (Artist quoted in Ranjit Hoskote, “Reflections on the Art of Ganesh Pyne,” Ganesh Pyne: A Pilgrim in the Dominion of Shadows, Mumbai: Galerie 88, 2005, p. 11)

The bones of an animal appear suspended in midair to the left of the canvas like a memento mori, a reminder of the perishability of flesh and inevitability of death. Despite the sense of melancholy, the composition also contains elements that signify hope. The lamp-seen here assembled from bones-appears as a symbol in many of Pyne’s works, ostensibly as a corollary to the shadow of death that is ever present. “...if the negation of life obsesses him, he also always introduces a countervailing source of illumination to register hope, courage, mental equilibrium. These are distinctive qualities in the content and treatment of Pyne’s art.” (Ella Dutta, “Introduction”, Sathi Basu ed., Ganesh Pyne: His Life and Times, Kolkata: CIMA, 1998, p. 15-16)

The present lot also demonstrates the skilled use of light and shadow, along with the characteristic luminosity found in Pyne’s works. He was inspired by Rembrandt’s chiaroscuro techniques, which he discovered through art books at the Government Art College library, and transitioned from watercolour to tempera in the 1960s. Guided by Nandalal Bose’s writings in Shilpa Chorcha, he experimented with various binders, ultimately choosing gum acacia which gave the pigments a certain glow. He expertly built up areas of light and shadow by layering translucent glazes, till the required colour saturation and sense of volume and depth were achieved.

Remarks writer and critic Ranjit Hoskote, “Pyne is a master of patterning; in a sense, this is how he controls the emotional chaos and the heart-breaking melancholia of his subject matter. His paintings are assembled together by alternate stripes of light and shadow, by neat ensembles of ribs, arrangements of bones, strange shapes of shadow. These are relics of the macabre, reliquaries of absence and loss; but they are also markers of order.” (Hoskote, p. 14)

The use of intensely personal imagery opens Pyne’s paintings to numerous interpretations. Works such as the present lot possess a “…self-assurance and yet also the tantalising quality of code. The viewer must read and re-read it as he goes along, guessing at meanings, putting the discrete parts of the puzzle together. Yet this is never mechanical activity: to participate in the experience of a Pyne painting is to complete its significance in one’s mind, where it explodes like a conceptual mine that has been activated by contact.” (Hoskote, p. 16).

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