Man enthroned

Prodosh Das Gupta was a leading light of the Calcutta Group of artists-with-a-conscience, from the fraught 1940s. Now, at long last, a retrospective of his works.

“I, for one, have tried to introduce in most of my sculptures the Indian sense of rhythm in gliding forms and lines which to my mind is a life-giving agent to sculpture. Fluidity of lines gives sculpture a soft and tender quality true to the Indian spirit against the rigidity and arrogance of their cubes and straight lines. Throughout the gamut of Indian creative art there has been no place for cubes and straight lines.”
Prodosh Das Gupta, Coomaraswamy Memorial Lecture, 1970

Looking at the contemporary art scenario in India, one obvious question is why there are so few sculptors compared to painters. This is particularly ironic because this is a country with a breathtaking sweep of sculptural heritage. There is an answer, and it has to do with the general condition of art practice anywhere in the world. Making a sculpture usually is more physically effortful than making a painting, and it the cost of materials is much higher. A sculptor’s studio needs to be larger than that of a painter — and similarly, the dealer’s godown or collector’s salon needs to be roomy enough to store sculptural works. Moving heavy sculptures is a problem, and there are fewer buyers of sculpture. Since big commissions are rare, even eminent sculptors have to rest content with small works.

These stray, disquieting thoughts come to mind at a major retrospective exhibition of the works of Prodosh Das Gupta, one of 20th-century India’s most eminent sculptors, in his birth centenary year. On till August 12, this show at Kolkata’s Victoria Memorial Hall, in collaboration with the Lalit Kala Akademi, presents Das Gupta’s relatively small bronze sculptures and a few drawings, although it manages to cover his diverse range of styles.

What is lacking in this show is even one large work. At the inner entrance of the Academy of Fine Arts, across the street from this exhibition venue, stands Das Gupta’s superb outdoor sculpture of a rotund woman in black stone (which, however, is not formally marked as having been done by him). What stopped the organiser from bringing this work across the street on loan?

* * *

Das Gupta had a chequered life of 79 years, from 1912 to 1991. He first trained in sculpture in the 1930s under Hironmoy Roy Chowdhury at the Government School of Art, Lucknow. Then he was under the tutelage of legendary sculptor Debi Prasad Roy Chowdhury at the Government College of Art, Madras. Later he studied sculpture at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, and took evening classes in bronze casting at LCC Central School there. Thereafter, he joined the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, an art school in Paris. He also wrote poetry, on art (including his book My Sculpture, 1956), taught at the Government College of Art and Crafts in Calcutta, and was appointed Curator of the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi.

The art of this stalwart sculptor evolved in myriad ways that, however, kept his rigorous academic training in the background. The show offers a glimpse of the broad sweep of his styles. Hungry Family (bronze, 1967) and Convicts (bronze, 1969) are the expression of his anguish for the lot of common man. The empathy in these works for the human predicament can be traced to the decade of the 1940s, his formative years as a practising artist.

One of the most impressionable period of India’s recent history, this decade embraced the freedom movement, the horrors of world war and the consequent Bengal Famine in 1943 that made a deep impression on Bengali poets, writers, thespians, composers and visual artists of that period. The dominant trend in art practice in India at the time was the Bengal School. It started as a reaction to the prevalent mode of British art education, and aimed to revive the canons of traditional Indian art. However, opinion was growing that stagnation had pervaded both colonial art education and the revivalist Bengal School.

At this juncture, in 1943, Das Gupta’s contemporaries Rathin Maitra (this writer’s father), and Subho Tagore, both artists, formed the Calcutta Group — and Prodosh Das Gupta, Gopal Ghosh, Nirode Mazumdar, Paritosh Sen, Prankrishna Pal and Kamala Das Gupta joined as founder members. The guiding motto of the Group was best conveyed in its slogan: “Art should be international and inter-dependent”. The Manifesto went on to say that “our art cannot progress or develop if we always look back to our past glories and cling to our old tradition at all cost. The vast new world of art, rich and infinitely varied, created by Masters the world over in all ages, beckons us.” The human condition was another concern of the members, so the manifesto also said that “The Gods and Goddesses are being pulled down from their lofty pedestals and MAN has been enthroned in their place.”

* * *

With this notion that contemporary Indian sculpture did not sprout from any single root, Das Gupta was in quest of a sculptural form to express contemporary sensibilities while preserving the innate transcendental ethos of traditional Indian art. He found much inspiration in the fluid rhythm of Auguste Rodin, the simplification of Constantin Brancusi’s forms, and the deconstruction of Henry Moore and others. In the course of time, Das Gupta’s figurative sculptures became ovoid; the shape of the egg was for him a symbol of creation or the story of Genesis. Egg Bird (bronze, 1975), Nest (bronze, 1975), and Surya Mukhi (bronze, 1978) are examples of this creative phase in which he also explored the negative volume of the egg shape through concave surfaces. Sun Worshippers (bronze, 1975) and Halves (bronze, 1979) are other exquisite examples with a monumental quality despite their small size. Another different style with marked flowing rhythms manifests in Symphony in Curves (1954) and Unfolding of Spring (bronze, 1976). These and other works are visible at this show, along with a few of Das Gupta’s drawings.

One would have liked to see his works in other media, too — wood, plaster, stone. Even the works on show are not ideally displayed. Many cannot be viewed from all sides as should be standard in a show of three-dimensional art. Finally, this writer was shocked to see at the show a version of the text of the Calcutta Group’s Manifesto, framed behind glass, that was published long after its original in 1943. In this later text, in the list of members of the Group, the names of the two original founders Rathin Maitra and Subho Tagore are conspicuously absent. It is indeed improper to exhibit this text without explaining anywhere that it is a much later version.