Important Notice

“Pyne likes to think of himself as a medievalist. And indeed, his visual imagination, like that of the visionaries and mystics of the past, sees beyond the rational, material world around him to the altered reality of an enchanted world. [...] He is most at home with his own inner world of darkness and light from which emerges the strange forms. The canvases are a reflection of this all-absorbing interior life.” (Ella Datta, Ganesh Pyne: His... “Pyne likes to think of himself as a medievalist. And indeed, his visual imagination, like that of the visionaries and mystics of the past, sees beyond the rational, material world around him to the altered reality of an enchanted world. [...] He is most at home with his own inner world of darkness and light from which emerges the strange forms. The canvases are a reflection of this all-absorbing interior life.” (Ella Datta, Ganesh Pyne: His Life and Times, Calcutta: Centre of International Modern Art, 1998, p17)

Ganesh Pyne’s works mirror the artist’s introspective and quiet understanding of the world. Born in Calcutta in 1937, Pyne had witnessed death and grief as a child. One specific incident that stood out for him was of a pile of dead bodies being carted away while he was playing with his friends. This was at a time when India was ravaged by the riots following its partition in 1947. The artist’s world view was moulded by the major events that unravelled at the time. At the age of fifteen, he encountered the art of Abanindranath Tagore at the Indian Museum in 1952. This influenced his choice of colour-palette and formal technique, and for a period his works revealed the influence of the Bengal School. His works from this period (such as The Boy, 1952; Thug, 1955; and Winter’s Morning, 1955) demonstrate a strong command over light, shadow and tone, and reveal a sensitivity through delicacy of form.

Pyne’s arrival at the medium of tempera came through a quest to discover his own idiom. He began to gradually free himself from the stronghold of the Bengal School; though watercolours featured intermittently in his later works, their delicacy and transparency had regressed into a redundancy. His choice of tempera came after his experiments with ink and gouache, and through his reading Nandalal Bose’s Shilpacharcha, which pushed him to create his own powder pigments. With his search for a new medium, his figurations also underwent a dramatic change. Breaking away from his naturalistic renderings, Pyne had begun to create two-dimensional, stylised, expressionistic figures which were reminiscent of folk art traditions.

This work, titled “The Gate”, can be interpreted literally and figuratively. Pyne often revisited his childhood through his canvases. The artist grew up in a huge house belonging to his maternal grandparents in Kaviraj Row. The house now exists only as a fragment of its former self, and the artist could have recollected it at the time of creating this piece. Pyne is known to have been a visually sensitive child with a fertile imagination. His grandmother would often narrate stories centred on heroic tales and macabre ghost stories. Viewed in this light, Pyne’s Gate is shrouded in mystery. Gates are a demarcation, an entry to another place. However, they do not function merely to delineate; they are indicative of ownership and control of territory. The pictorial representation becomes a chapter in a bigger story, unsettling the viewer through a fear of the unknown.

“The Gate” shows an evolution in style and colour. Pyne’s earliest tempera works from the early 1960s reveal a predisposition to experimenting. Tempera pigments impose a limit on the artist; they are available only in a few shades. Pyne’s use of black for the gate is magnetic—the viewer is drawn to the centre of the canvas, and he seems to have structured the ochre, brown, white and blue around this portal of black. “What Pyne never says but it is obvious in his work is that with the use of tempera, he has devised a style whereby he gives an enigmatic form to his melancholic interior world without screaming out loud about his personal sorrows and a sense of loss.” (Ella Datta quoted in Yashodhara Dalmia, “The Life and Times of Ganesh Pyne”, Lalit Kala Contemporary 44, New Delhi: Lalit Kala Akademi, 2001, p42)

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