KG Subramanyan combined in himself the role of an artist, teacher, modernist and theorist, says Uma Nair
Art Heritage has a penchant for putting up museum quality shows that set you thinking about the depth and stealth that Indian contemporary art can portray. last week it was KG Subramanyan’s drawings of Women Seen and Remembered that were opened to art lovers across ages and mediums.
India’s Modernist
KG Subramanyan is referred to as India’s modernist as he was one of the most influential Indian artists, teachers, and theorists of the twentieth century who worked during a transformative period in Indian history. He was shaped by the contradictions of colonialism and nationalism, tradition and modernism and indigenism and globalisation.
From 1950 to his retirement from teaching in 1989, he helped shape the aesthetic vision of the art departments at the Maharaja Sayajirao University in Baroda and the Visva-Bharati University in Santiniketan. With great clarity, sensitivity and wit, he inspired generations of artists and scholars through his prolific writings, lectures and art.
At Art Heritage this is a veritable archive of visual kinetics. Scholars state that over 50 per cent of Subramanyan’s drawings and sketches were exclusively of women, which means he found them subjects of a robust canvas of thoughts.There is no doubt he had the eye of an epicurean.
1950s to 2000s
Covering a span of six decades between the 1950s and 2000s, we glimpse how women on his radar were in constant flux of what he explored. He captured their conversations in a corollary of moments within the context of a male dominated scenario.
Kudos to the curators for arranging the show chronologically, “the slumped, domesticated body of the woman of the 1950s, transforms into a self-aware coquette in the 1970s, presenting herself in her full blown, stark sensuality.”
But sensuality for Subramanyan was not ugly eroticism, rather it had a seductive aura of subtle sensuality. With the 1980s and 90s there are equivocal undertones. Feminism plays out in the frames, there is also the suggestion of antagonism on the chessboard of gender wars. Its the evolution in the 2000s that becomes defining as a testimony to womanhood on the world stage. “From around this time the artist delineates the woman in her avenging avatar, as the goddess who kills Mahishasura. Mounted on a tiger, the woman is charged with cosmic energy and she is seen in all her glorious resplendent beauty.”
Between reality and dreams
These women in watercolours sometimes minimal sometimes smudged, live between their own reality and dreams. The show hinges on Subramanyan’s polymorphic aesthetic vision of art and culture within the context of modern India. It also gives us a narrative of the many influences Subramanyan absorbed in the country and abroad while elucidating his unique contributions to contemporary Indian art theory and practice.
Subramanyan was a major presence on the Indian art scene both as an artist and a mentor. It wouldn’t be wrong to say that he had the pragmatism and precision of the southern sensibility coupled with a world view of weaving in dynamics of dialogues bridging the past and the present. This show encompasses dulcet doodles, scribbles, sketches, studies, tinted drawings, and drawings with pigments; done using ballpoint pen, brush and ink, crayon, alone or in combination with colour or ink washes and in gouache; and employing graphic devices ranging from marks, scrawls, calligraphic brush work as well as freehand flourishes.
Subramanyan’s repertoire of drawings is large and many tell us that it’s fine for him to leave a stroke unfinished. To look at his drawings is to see how he reflected the world he saw. We see humour and alacrity and an astute vision of the conscious and unseen.
This show draws on the vast pool of images he created by appropriating ideas and forms from every civilisation and art movement. His brilliance at juxtaposition and his style of fusing international symbolism with his own observations of life around his house at Purvapalli as well as Santiniketan, reveals his vocabulary and his virtuosity.
Deities and dancing women
Women for Subramanyan could be Indian folk goddesses, bulbous demons, lingering deities, dancing women or ladies in déshabillé invading interiors as well as a street scene.
Colour for him was also about the context of conversation. Sometimes its muddy browns, dark greens and blues-sometimes a blushing pink, a warm peach, a russet or muddy ochre yellow. What fascinates is his imagination and his ingenuity. It is enticing how he created fractured female bodies and faces with a swift flurry of strokes. His observations of women remind us that Subramanyan belongs to the lineage of artists of Santiniketan with his mentor, Benode Behari Mukherjee, preceding him. He imagined an Indian present from a traditional past even as he blended encounters with the outside world. This show exemplifies the truth of his own dictum when he said: “Synthesis is our tradition.” In the fusion of many frames he gave us a polymorphic vision and therein lies the history of a modernist master. In Indian art history you can’t talk of modernism without the name of KG Subramanyan.
The show runs till September 9.