 "A BB Mukherjee collage; the artist was blind for the last 24 years of his life")
Benode Behari Mukherjee, alumnus and faculty from Kala Bhavana at Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan, struggled with visual impairment for much of his life, which makes his murals in the campus all the more extraordinary. But, in 1957, following an eye operation, he was pronounced blind. What could be more tragic than complete loss of sight for an artist? But Mukherjee, far from retreating into a shell, continued to work as an artist for the 24 years he lived following his clinical blindness, making drawings from memory, but working mostly on collages, following in the footsteps of Henri Matisse.
Matisse had been diagnosed with cancer and confined to a wheelchair before surgery won him a second lease of life. But restrained in his movements, he switched to "painting with scissors" as he started work on his colour paper collages, sometimes finely detailed and on occasion epic in scale, taking ahead the convention of distortion that his career and that of fellow impressionists had been defined by.
It was a wonderful surprise then to stumble into a gallery on the second floor of the Tate Modern in London where, to one side of a massive work by Matisse, a set of Mukherjee's paper collages had been mounted. Part of the museum's permanent collection, the Mukherjees and Matisse were part of works specially mounted to explain form and colour to schoolchildren visiting the gallery. Accompanying placards helped the queues of students note their observations.
While paper cut outs and collages appear simple and likely to appeal to young students, their making for both Matisse and Mukherjee accompanied complex ideas. Mukherjee was aware of Matisse's work because he and other impressionists had inspired artists in Japan, a country the Indian artist had visited in 1937, a full decade before Matisse commenced work on his new body of work. He continued to read and, as a teacher at Kala Bhavana, lead discussions on European modernism, and so would be familiar with Matisse's experiments with paper and colour and would later observe that even geometric shapes have appeal for their "sensation and association".
Indian art has not been sufficiently placed within an international arc - or, at least, has suffered from unfair comparisons mostly of the making by Indian scholars so it is refreshing to see the Tate draw parallels that are not prejudicial but intended to capture similarities without reducing the debate to a mere table of influences and impacts. This is especially important when technology allows us to reduce the sum of an artist's work as being derived from another artist simply on the basis of mediums that may have a likeness. Marc Duchamp may have been the original champion of the found or manufactured object, but in the manner in which Subodh Gupta uses steel utensils, or Tayeba Begum Lipi in Dhaka turns it into a gender debate using shaving blades, is entirely different. It is the total experience, body of work and the issues it raises that must inform the viewer - and the critic who guides the formation of opinions - rather than superficial similarities. Artists, after all, do observe each others' work, and there is always a moment when such parallels course through the global world of art. As we sit at the cusp of climate change, with religious wars and strife rampant, it would be impossible for artists not to react and report on these issues with the current materials in hand. And whether they have influenced each other or not should be left to future generations to judge, when it may matter a little less than it does now.
Kishore Singh is a Delhi-based writer and art critic. These views are personal and do not reflect those of the organisation with which he is associated
