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Lot 72

 

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“I find that unless there is some truth in your work, the painting does not seem authentic… The glimpse of truth in one’s work is more important for me than whether you use colour well or other such technical virtuosity.” - BHUPEN KHAKHAR

The human figure was an essential element of Bhupen Khakhar’s style. Speaking of the centrality of figuration to his oeuvre, the artist said, “I have always felt that the human being is the... “I find that unless there is some truth in your work, the painting does not seem authentic… The glimpse of truth in one’s work is more important for me than whether you use colour well or other such technical virtuosity.” - BHUPEN KHAKHAR

The human figure was an essential element of Bhupen Khakhar’s style. Speaking of the centrality of figuration to his oeuvre, the artist said, “I have always felt that the human being is the source. Sometimes landscapes fascinate me. But I feel my paintings are incomplete without figures. Everything I see is in connection with the figure.” (Artist quoted in Chris Dercon and Nada Raza eds., “Sadanand Menon Interviews Bhupen Khakhar”, Bhupen Khakhar: You Can’t Please All, London: Tate Publishing, 2016, p. 166) He deployed the human figure in his playful satire of the hypocrisies present in “the vast terrain of half-westernised, half-urbanised modern India.” (“The Insignificant Man (197-76)”, Timothy Hyman, Bhupen Khakhar, Bombay: Chemould Publication and Arts in association with Mapin Publishing, 1998, p. 41)

The confessional tone of the title of the present lot, No. 2: My Wife, is similar to the one Khakhar used in a fanciful biographical note in his 1972 catalogue Truth is Beauty and Beauty is God to “to confront class and sexuality with sardonic critique tempered with familiarity and even affection.” (Nada Raza, A Man Labelled Bhupen Khakhar Branded as Painter”, Bhupen Khakhar: You Can’t Please All, 2016, p. 13) The work can be seen as an extension of an amusing bit he kept up for his friends long after his coming out as a gay man. He would often tell obviously false tales involving a wife and two sons to entertain friends in person and through correspondence.

With a couple in a loving embrace in the foreground Khakhar arranges the pictorial space by manipulating the familiar cramped setting of a lower middle class urban household using the compositional principles of Indian miniature painting. A vertical line divides the space almost evenly into two, with even more rectilinear divisions producing a formidable formal structure as noted by critic Timothy Hyman. This structure allows for a window in the form of a cupboard mirror in which an older man is reflected observing this private act. His presence confounding the coupling is exemplary of the artist’s proclivity for using the window as a motif to interrogate the distinction between private and public worlds.

Khakhar’s meticulous placement of recognisably everyday middle class objects like a ceiling fan, a pillow and a shirt on a hanger into the scene betrays his training as an accountant. He would file away things he saw while not in his studio and run them through a roster of artists he admired in order to come to a decision on how to best render them. Although critical of his class and an expert observer of their aesthetic and moral foibles, Khakhar’s rendering of the implements of middle class living are as affectionate as they are satirical. Says Hyman, “The pictures that result are the work of an accountant: their determining structure is a pseudo-bureaucratic itemisation… reality must be taken to pieces and meticulously reconstructed… Each painting becomes a kind of container or cabinet, to display a range of vivid, crisply depicted items. Yet, curiously, the result of this process is to convey a kind of identification; it is a most compassionate inventory, an effort to touch and handle what is real, undertaken with love and humility.” (Hyman, p. 42)

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