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| India's most iconic works of art | | Putting together a list of India?s 10 most important paintings is as difficult as predicting the outcome of the general elections |
| Kishore Singh / New Delhi May 02, 2009, 00:31 IST |
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Putting together a list of India’s most iconic works of Indian art - something that has not been attempted before - is at least as difficult as predicting the outcome of the general elections. Especially when we decided that the cut-off would rest at the 10 most important paintings.
How could we leav e out the Tagores? Include a Bhupen Khakhar but eliminate Arpita Singh? Riyas Komu but not Sudhir Patwardhan? How could we place the pre-moderns and moderns on the same platform as the contemporaries? What would our indicators be — price, relevance, history? With a small jury culled from the art fraternity, the near-impossibility of the task became evident.
A list such as this is desirable if only because it opens up a debate in the mainstream, and allows us to invest a little more interest in our art treasures. Of course it is subjective, limiting, limited — and necessarily flawed. That hardly matters, and we’re open to hate mail, but the result has been that we now have three definitive lists — of India’s 10 most significant works of (pre-modern and) modern art, of five most iconic works of contemporary art, and unfairly, but because it was difficult to secure a place for them on our other lists, five most important works of sculpture.
In addition, we have reproduced the lists from some of our major contributors — some include contemporaries, others don’t, and almost everyone has cheated on the numbers, not restricting themselves to just 10 works. The idea is not to show up the differences, but highlight the reasons for debate on these lists, and increase awareness in the public domain about our art treasures. Whether you agree with our choices or not, we invite you to write in with your views and/or your own lists, to iconicart@bsmail.in.
1 F N SOUZA
DEATH OF A POPE
Medium: Oil on canvas
Year: 1962
Collection: Tate, London
There’s no doubt that F N Souza is India’s most significant artist, someone who turned the whole idea of “Indian” on its head to bring to his canvas something that gave his peers in London and Paris a run for their money. His Birth is the most expensive canvas ever auctioned (the winning bid of Rs 10.6 crore at Christie’s was made by art promoter and collector Tina Ambani), and gallerist Arun Vadehra (and many others) rank his Crucifixion at the Tate, London, his most important work — “on par with his contemporary Francis Bacon”, according to Vadehra — but Souza’s, and India’s, most important work of art is without a doubt Death of a Pope. “There’s no question about it,” says Nitin Bhayana, art collector, “that it is his most iconic work.” Agrees Ashish Anand of Delhi Art Gallery, “It is his best.”
2 TYEB MEHTA
CELEBRATION
Medium: Acrylic on canvas
Year: 1985
Collection: Private collection
If it wasn’t for the little matter of their being his own paintings, Tyeb Mehta might have been likened to the Taliban for his penchant for destroying canvases. Mehta has been known to deface even works sold by him, guided by the sole criterion that he is unhappy with the outcome. What Ebrahim Alkazi said of his paintings in a sense defines this: “Sentimentalism has no place in Mehta’s work,” he said at a talk in 1959, yet he makes the argument that “Such art is not the art of despair but hope.” Mahishasura, auctioned for over Rs 8 crore some years back, might be his most significant work in terms of value, but according to some the jury is out over his Kali (Nitin Bhayana’s collection) which was loaned to the Tate and was last year exhibited at the Valencia show, the Santiniketan triptych, the importance of the Diagonal series, but it is Celebration with its “suppressed and contradictory energy”, the hallmark of Mehta, which gets our vote.
3 M F HUSAIN
ZAMEEN
Medium: Oil on canvas
Year: 1955
Collection: National Gallery of Modern Art
What is there you can say about India’s most prolific and, according to many, its most important painter? If one were to look at the complete body of even his most significant works, Husain would lead other artists by far. Known popularly for his horses, and the political issues surrounding his works on Indira Gandhi and Mother Teresa, the artist’s work most often quoted as his best is Between the Spider and the Lamp, a series he first ventured in 1956, but returned to in the seventies, and more recently in 2000. “Husain rarely abandons a motif, metaphor or a theme,” writes K Bikram Singh in his recent book on the painter. “The theme of the spider-and-the-lamp seems to have obsessed Husain for several decades.” His Man, also from the fifties, is critically acclaimed, a rare work that is “weighed down by anxiety and melancholy”, while like Arvind Vijaymohan, art advisor, others look to his Mahabharats series, and particularly Battle of Ganga and Jamuna as his seminal work. Zameen is important because, as Nitin Bhayana explains, “It is the first work that explained rural India in a modern fashion.” Bikram Singh though refers to it as not fully realised, something that “does not rise above its concept”, even if it did win Husain the National Award. Husain, now resident in Dubai, is working on a series commission on the Arabic civilisation — which might reveal further treasures.
4 AMRITA SHER-GIL
BRIDE’S TOILET
Medium: Oil on canvas
Year: 1938
Collection: National Gallery of Modern Art
Amrita Sher-Gil was the face of India’s modern art, born to a Hungarian mother, educated in Paris, who returned to India to create for herself an Indian idiom at a time when other Indian artists were looking to the West for inspiration. Her works won her few accolades, the glamour of her short life overpowering even her art, but the importance of what she has achieved is now part of the annals of art history. Some critics go to the extent of saying that the highlight of the National Gallery of Modern Art, Delhi, is the Sher-Gil gallery, which houses most of her works. As is usual, choosing a single “best” work is hugely controversial. Nitin Bhayana insists the ranked works that are most significant for him include Brahmacharis for its “pure Indian subject”, South Indian Villagers Going to the Market and/or Hill Women, the last on most “best” lists, though Bride’s Toilet is the Business Standard choice, something with which Dinesh Vazirani agrees.
5 V S GAITONDE
UNTITLED
Medium: Oil on canvas
Year: 1971
Collection: National Gallery of Modern Art
What does one say about an artist all of whose works are Untitled, yet are so significant that one refers to them as the “brown work” or the “one with yellow hues” and so on? Maybe the lack of titles, and that Gaitonde was among the earliest abstractionists — though he himself refused to be so classified — who was also reclusive, has meant that Gaitonde’s presence in mainstream recollection is poor. But Gaitonde is among India’s most significant artists, whose early inspirations were Paul Klee, Joan Miro, Wassily Kandinsky and Georges Rouault. His canvases are luminescent for the art lover who can decipher symbols and hieroglyphics and calligraphy in the light, colour and texture of his canvases. Notes Neville Tuli about this work, “The contemplative, process-driven joy of Gaitonde best reflects our iconic universality.”
6 S H RAZA
LA TERRE-II
Medium: Acrylic on canvas
Year: 1987
It is difficult to imagine that there was ever a time when Raza painted churches, or landscapes, or nudes, or did portraits — yet his genesis was the podium of European art on which Souza was to found his reputation. But Raza’s quest was to paint something quintessentially Indian, a search that began (and some say ended) with the Bindu, the symbol, Raza says, “not only of Hindu spirituality, but also of Indian art, aesthetics and awareness of life”. No wonder he says, “Wherever my painting hangs, I create a temple.” Raza’s work is among the most significant and aware, and many of his works claim a place in the sun among the most important works of Indian art. They are laden with meaning, and often accompanied by verses, text or calligraphy. Arun Vadehra as also other Raza-watchers claim that his most iconic work is Maa (the full name is Maa, laut kar jab aaunga), though Dinesh Vazirani says it could be Satpura or Tapovan, others claim the more abstracted Rajasthan series as meriting that attention, art critic and close friend Ashok Vajpeyi claiming Maa and La Terre as the epitome of his style, while gallerist and Raza authoritarian Sunaina Anand says La Terre — II makes that grade since it is a body of work which, unlike Maa has neither been repeated, nor is predictable. We agree.
7 RAJA RAVI VARMA
LAKSHMI
Medium: Oil on canvas
Year: 1890s
Collection: Gaekwad family, Lakshmi Vilas Palace, Baroda
The contribution of probably India’s most remarkable artist is now seen mostly through negative shades. This king of kitsch may not have a single work that can match the canvases of the later moderns, but a century later his works are still seen on more pavements, posters and prints than that of any other Indian painter ever. Using traditional or mythological or religious contexts, he used the European artist’s eye to create pan-India images of gods and kings and fairytale characters, later turned into prints. Finally, Indian homes had a “face” for their gods and goddesses, the saree was draped in a style that created a fashion trend, and stories were brought alive: the painted figures would go on to influence the way they would later be presented in theatre or shown on the silver screen. According to Neville Tuli, no one Ravi Varma image is any more iconic than another, so he has picked Lakshmi to comment: “If one artist can be blamed for influencing the aesthetic sensibility of a nation, then Ravi Varma is he. Most eyes can no longer perceive any of our gods without their saree, such is his stifling iconic effect.” Ashish Anand says, “If Indians are unified by their gods, we have Ravi Varma to thank.”
8 NANDALAL BOSE
SIVA DRINKING THE WORLD’S POISON
Medium: Line wash and watercolour on paper
Year: 1933
Collection: One is in the National Gallery of Modern Art, the other in the Osian’s Archive & Library Collection
India’s first and truly most renaissance painter, few know even now that Nandlal Bose’s work has been used to illustrate the Indian Constitution. An artist who dabbled across mediums, and with consummate skill, his range and style were characteristic of the modern movement that had been spearheaded to a large extent by the Tagores in Santiniketan. Like Abanindranath Tagore, Bose — who was principal of Kala Bhavan in Santiniketan — attempted printmaking. While the Tagores themselves are significant as artists, it is difficult to pick out any one work from them as having brought about a significant change, or changed the course of art in the country. Bose’s technique, unlike theirs, was a blend of the oriental and the occidental, with a greater degree of Asian influences, while not ignoring the West.
9 CHITTAPROSAD
BENGAL FAMINE SERIES
Medium: Drawings and paintings
Year: 1940s
Collection: Various
The artist as a documenter has never got his place in the sun, and Chittaprosad, more than most, was that — a true artist who recorded graphic images of despair around him. The result was that in much of his lifetime he was ignored, the result perhaps of staying away from pretty pictures to paint what was painful, a consequence of natural calamities and human greed. Certainly, his Bengal Famine series is a haunting record of the trials and tribulations of that period, a fine body of work which, for Neville Tuli, is bested only by his Bangladesh War. “No other artist represented the social and political responsibility of the artist with the ethical and aesthetic integrity as did Chittaprosad,” he says.
10 BHUPEN KHAKHAR
MAN WITH A BOUQUET OF PLASTIC FLOWERS
Medium: Oil on canvas
Year: 1975
Collection: Private collection
India’s David Hockney, Bhupen Khakhar is representative of the experimentation associated with the arts faculty and community in Baroda. He created a style of telling many stories within one frame without losing focus on a single subject. He would have remained important but insignificant but for his coming out of the closet, as gay, in his late middle age, when he was able to paint boldly on homosexual subjects. For this reason alone, You Can’t Please Them All is highly regarded. But collectors identify Man With a Bouquet of Plastic Flowers as his most important, a symbol of the rhythms and emptiness, indeed loneliness, of urban life.
TOP 5
ICONIC WORKS OF CONTEMPORARY ART
We had to separate the moderns from the contemporaries — ideally, the list of 10 definitive works should have included these — but having cheated a little, here are the five works of contemporary art that have changed the way we look at the world
1 SUBODH GUPTA
Very Hungry God
Medium: Installation using stainless steel utensils
Year: 2006
Subodh Gupta made art from the commonplace — cycles and milk pails and taxis, but most of all from utensils, with which he both painted as well as created installations. Very Hungry God, which was shown around the same time Damien Hirst was exhibiting another skull, a diamond-encrusted one, is a throwback to hunger and want, and provokes thinking of the colossal waste of the world at a time when millions sleep hungry, of soup kitchens and food habits, of kitchens and a world struggling for survival in so many ways.
2 ATUL DODIYA
Missing 1, 2, 3
Medium: Enamel on metal roller shutters
Year: 2000
Collection: Nitin Bhayana
Atul Dodiya is probably India’s most thinking painter among the contemporaries, someone who intellectualises his learning and knowledge and quest — and his shows have been different from the others’: curious paradoxes where he searches for identity as much as for lost people. Nitin Bhayana thinks his Missing 1,2,3 about Bombay, part of his rolling shutters series, is his most important work, though both Lakshmi, which deals with wealth and suicide, as well as Bapu are at least as complex and involving. His Three Painters is possibly his most clever work and was auctioned by Christies in 2007.
3 BHARTI KHER
The Skin Speaks a Language Not Its Own
Medium: Bindis on fibre-glass
Year: 2006
Bharti Kher is a calibrated artist, one who is extremely austere in her repertoire, and works extensively with bindis, the ornamental dot that Indian women wear on their foreheads. Earlier, she had looked at multiple identities — moustaches on faces, for instance — but her bindis have taken on a form and language of their own, asking critical questions.
4 JITISH KALLAT
Autosaurus Tripous
Medium: Fibreglass
Year: 2007
After a brilliant start, where Jitish Kallat created distorted photo images on a large scale, to create political and social graffiti, as it were, it seemed that he might languish, till he bounced back with his Universal Recipient series and Richshawpolis and then his Jurassic Park inspired series, using the bones of dino-like creatures to build urban stories built around a macabre context.
5 RIYAS KOMU
Petro Angel series
Medium: Oil on canvas
Year: 2006
The surprise inclusion here, and possibly the youngest, Riyas Komu has proved his sustainability through the sheer power of his work. Komu’s multi-faceted art heritage has already been on display: painting, sculpture, photography and video installations among them. He has a compelling presence, and his portraits offer themselves up to a raw gaze as in this case where six large photo-realistic frames of an Irani actress create an intimate, engaging environment about a current political debate.
THE BEST 5
SCULPTURES IN INDIA
1 RAM KINKER BAIJ
Santhal Family
Medium: Concrete
Collection: Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan
This was India’s first tryst with modern sculpture, and it remains the most iconic work of its age and relevance.
2 RAVINDER REDDY
Radha
Medium: Fibreglass
Year: 2007
Collection: Sold by Saffronart to a private collector
This seven-ft high head auctioned by Saffronart is representative of Reddy’s monumentality. It lacks the raw sensuality of some of his other heads, but the sense of completeness in Radha is more exquisite. Reddy has been doing these large scale busts for a long while now, and his later works are more meditative in their poise.
3 MEERA MUKHERJEE
Ashok at Kalinga
Medium: Bronze
Collection: ITC Maurya Sheraton
Meera Mukherjee has proved her versatility in more ways than one — such as this huge bronze commissioned for the hotel, or even rope sculptures, which represent her ability to move between mediums with a rare degree of comfort.
4 SOMNATH HORE
The Hanging
Medium: Bronze
A poster maker for the Communist Party, printmaker and on the faculty of arts colleges in Calcutta, Baroda, Delhi and Santiniketan, Somnath Hore is best known for the anguish he brings to his bronze sculptures, and most noticeably in this iconic work. Somnath Hore’s printmaking skills. especially his lithographs, too broke new ground, and many consider him ahead of his times.
5 K S RADHAKRISHNAN
Ramp
Medium: Bronze
Year: 2004
Collection: Osian’s Archive & Library
Radhakrishnan’s ongoing romance with Musui and Maiya resulted in several iconic sculptures, in collections in India and abroad, but apart from their sense of motion, there was a sense of repetitiveness about some of them. With the gigantic Ramp, he has broken that mould, one huge figure dwarfing hundreds of small figures, in a work that has since not been repeated.
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