Primary colours

An exhibition of V P Singh's art reveals a lesser-known side of the country's former prime minister

It is said that in every work of art, the artist is present. That is particularly true for the exhibition of the last works of former prime minister Vishwanath Pratap Singh. Even though he was prime minister only for a year, and he passed away in 2008, his political legacy is clearly the invisible presence in the room where his paintings are exhibited.

Singh was the Raja of Manda in Uttar Pradesh. He was a politician who went from being Mr Clean to the author of caste politics. But at this exhibition, he was just a grandfather, a poet and a successful painter. Two of the 55 works displayed sold for Rs 2 lakh and Rs 3.5 lakh within the first half hour of the exhibition. His sketches sold for around Rs 55,000 each.

Although Singh started painting when he was young, it was only when Maneka Gandhi asked for one of his sketches for her annual exhibition for People for Animals that he gained the confidence to pursue his interest in painting. The sketch sold almost instantly. He exhibited mostly in Delhi and Mumbai between 1999 and 2006 and once in London in 1998. This is his first posthumous show and it puts on display the work he did in the last two years of his life.

The range and mediums of his talents are considerable. He was a painter, photographer, author and poet who mostly wrote in Hindi. His painting styles ranged from Impressionist, Expressionist, Tachist, non-figurative abstract and even Surrealist. In terms of medium, he used pencil and charcoal drawings, watercolours, oils, pastels and acrylic.

This exhibition displays his watercolours. Almost all of them were created during the last year of his life when he was suffering from bone marrow cancer, though some of the sketches were done earlier.

A number of the paintings displayed are landscapes or portraits, and the latter sell better. The predominant colours are browns, greens, blues and black, with yellow being used for the cave art and some portraits. (His granddaughter mentions that he added pink to only one painting and she woke the next morning to find it in the dustbin. She rescued it and made him sign his name on it).

Very few of the watercolours displayed are restful. Instead, there's a sense of tremendous energy, catastrophe and chaos in them. There are often faces hidden in the backdrop of his work. The landscapes often show figures dwarfed by natural calamities like lightning or storms. The paintings that feature the river near his house are less violent, though even in those, the human figures are overshadowed by elements of nature. The ambivalence of watercolours suits his vision that seems to fluctuate between pessimism and fear in many of his paintings.

The human figures are equally interesting. Almost all of them show side or back profiles and there's a focus on the hair that hides the remainder of the face. Others are similar to imagery in cave art, with stick figures carrying spears . The women in these cave art paintings are appealing. They provide a contrast to other darker paintings done in black and white that show women surrounded by figures or lying buried with their faces covered.

Perhaps his most beautiful and detailed works remain his work with animal figures. From the abstract cat and a detailed painting of a round swarm of ants to watercolours of dogs - pets and strays - these are paintings in the most traditional sense.

Singh was an artist who allowed the ghost to stay home. He would regularly ask his friends, like painter Paresh Maity, to evaluate his work as an unknown artist to find out if he was any good.

"Selected Paintings by Vishwanath Pratap Singh" will be on view till June 5 at Aryan Art Gallery, Defence Colony, New Delhi