Ganesh Pyne

A Painter of Eloquent Silence

Ganesh Pyne

Pranabranjan Ray

Ganesh Pyne Ganesh Pyne (11 June 1937-12 March 2013), the painter was born and brought up in their crumbling ancestral mansion in an ethnically divided older part of Calentta. As he grew up listening to grandmother’s narration of folk tales and puranik myths in dim-twilights, the shy and curious youngster increasingly willed to visualise the fantasies he would weave around what he listened to, through doodling. But not until he himself had started reading Abarindranath’s tales for children, and still later, drooling over the reproductions of his darkness-illuminating drawings and paintings –– published in contemporary periodicals –– that Ganesh felt the urge of visualizing imagination. But before gaining that kind of mental angle, a traumatic worldly experience left a permanent effect on the future of his creative personality. The Great Calcutta Killing of 1946, one of the main events that ultimately led to the partition of India, even though temporarily – uprooted the family from its century-old home and made the not-yet teen-aged boy face violence, destruction and death. Later, it would not so much be the facts of violence, destruction and death, but apprehension and premonition of these, would condition his creative gaze into events and happenings. However, all these were to be revealed slowly later through his creative career.

After completing his secondary education, Ganesh Pyne took admission to Calcutta’s Government Art College, from where he graduated in 1959. He utilised his stint at the art school not only in honing his skill in standardised art practice and widening the horizon of visual study of past art, but also in research into ways and means of choosing and adapting art technology for his personal idiom. Mature Pyne’s art amply demonstrates his success in this score. After the completion of his institutional art education, Pyne got engaged in making of animation film, for living. Alongside, he also got deeply involved in print-media publications designing, especially in book illustration, wherein also he left his mark of individuality.

Although apparently shy and introvert, Ganesh Pyne’s mental involvement with human affairs never let him to be a recluse or an outsider. In fact, his interest in on-going art activities led him to get associated with the Society of Contemporary Artists, then Calcutta’s most happening artists’ group. However, the basically lone sojourner, could never march with a regiment.

Published in association with Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, and Akar Prakar, Kolkata.

With 68 illustrations.

A Painter of Eloquent Silence

Ganesh Pyne

A Painter of Eloquent Silence

Ganesh Pyne Pranabranjan Ray

First published in 2018 by Lalit Kala Akademi in collaboration with Akar Prakar The publishers Lalit Kala Akademi and Akar Prakar thank Mrs. Meera Pyne.

Text © Pranabranjan Ray Photographs © Vivek Das, Akar Prakar, and individual collections are listed in the Index.

All rights reserved under international copyright conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Copyediting: Pranabranjan Ray and Ankona Das Proofreading: Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi Editorial support: Akar Prakar Archival research: Vikram Mehra Design and Production: Shilpi Chakraborty Printed at Archana, New Delhi Cover His belongings Ink and wash, 1977

Lalit Kala Akademi Rabindra Bhavan New Delhi 110001 T: +91 011 2300 9200 | F: +91 011 2300 9292 E: lka@lalitkala.gov.in � lalitkala1954@yahoo.in www.lalitkala.gov.in Akar Prakar P 238 Hindustan Park Kolkata 700029 T: +91 33 2464 2617 E: info@akarprakar.com www.akarprakar.com

Contents 8

From the Heart of Darkness

93 100

Plates: 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s

116

A Postscript

122

Biography

130

Index

36 40 56 83

“Once in my paintings I aimed at fusing Abanindranath’s mode of viewing and Rembrandt’s expressive use of light and darkness.’’

(Pyne, Desh, 1399 BS)

Untitled (detail) Pen and ink 1979

From the Heart of Darkness PRANABRANJAN RAY

G

anesh Pyne’s (1937–2013) largest tempera paintings were the smallest exhibits in anthological expositions of his and his contemporaries’ works. While more attractive creations of some of his peers would hit visual sensation and stir viewers’ sensibilities, a Ganesh Pyne work, would first draw the viewer’s attention with elegant disquiet. And then, his intriguing imagery, in intricate configuration, would provoke the viewer to read the work intimately. A Ganesh Pyne work would engage the viewer in unravelling the mystery spread out before his eyes. Pyne turned his viewers into scanners of visual text.

Although the Modernist art demands the beholder of visual fare to be an unalloyed viewer, one of the acknowledged pioneers of Modernism, the Symbolist poet Charles Baudelaire would long for internal correspondence between different arts.

Ganesh Pyne, in his paintings and drawings, did probably put that correspondence into effect. But then, Modernism, by and large, stood for autonomy of each art, as a norm. It is a norm that Pyne and his art emphatically defy. And yet, Pyne’s art demands to be recognized as essentially modern, for being

objectifications of individual conception—both thematically and linguistically. For the freethinking viewer–reader and the constantly viewing collector this category defiance of Pyne’s oeuvre is the initial take-off point of an overarching discourse on Ganesh Pyne—the distinguished modern-India painter.

Take any tempera painting or a duotonic Ganesh Pyne drawing or sketch done between 1960 and 1995, it is sure to defy all attempts at categorization in terms of stylistic and thematic kinship. Despite proclamation of unique individuality of the Modern artist, relentless efforts to find, what the logician Ludwig Witgenstein termed “family resemblance” in the works of supposedly atomized artists is the staple of much discourse on Modern art. Writers are happier when discussing Pyne’s pre-1960 watercolours, gouaches and drawings, for in these they comfortably discern influences of Abanindranath Tagore’s less imaginary works, a conclusion which Pyne himself would endorse. Pyne’s post-1995 oeuvre too is less problematic, for much of the work of this period would appear as permutation

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and combination of elements of peak-period oeuvre, although not devoid of changes towards stern simplicity. Yet, for an assessment of Ganesh Pyne’s genius, attention needs to be focused on the 1960–95 period.

The Boy (detail) Watercolour 1955

Although image-wise distanced (‘distorted’, to use a crude but commonly used term) from their correspondent phenomena or phenomenal correlate, phenomenally out-of-scale juxtaposition of motifs or images, and above all configuration of linearly delineated motif or images on Pyne’s heavily worked pictorial surface present unmistakable pictorial events or situations. The constructed events and situations never fail to suggest and/or evoke phenomenal parallels to the events and/or situations from the beholder’s own memory and knowledge bank. Take any tempera work from the ’70s, like The Harbour (1971) or The Night of the Merchant (1985), The Fisherman (1972), The Footprint (1975) or The Assassin (1979)—the presented pictorial event or situation is too imaginary, too contrived, too constructed to be similar to any phenomenal event or situation.

Yet, the manner in which each image, each motif is spatially posited against each other, scale-wise and chromatically, tends to narrate an event, more than describe a situation. The visual gestalt provokes the viewer–reader to read the narrative content of the painting in view.

To carry our deconstruction exercise further, let us be aware that the character-indicators of most of Pyne’s paintings, drawings and sketches are doing-figures, images of human and non-human beings. But they are all beings frozen in the midst of actions. Cineaste Pyne got his technical clue for these ‘freeze shots’ from François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows and Satyajit Ray’s Charulata. More often than not—such as in Raktakarabi, a work executed in 1957 (one is not sure whether the takeoff is from the Rabindranath Tagore’s play or from

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Sombhu Mitra’s eponymous stage production)— they all are lonesome beings—irrespective of whether they are humans, animals or birds. This aspect lends extra quality to the narrativity of Pyne’s work. Lonesome as the characters may be, they nonetheless are social types. They represent similar people in comparable situations.

One cardinal quality of Pyne’s work needs to be emphasized; their narrativity neither follows from nor depends upon pre-existent literary texts, although, at times, reference to known literary texts can be discerned in many of Pyne’s paintings, the works on their own do not need the literary texts as props. In fact, Pyne’s paintings carry more references to cinematic texts and stage productions than to lettered texts. We have already taken note of Raktakarabi. That Pyne’s Before the Fountain (1991) is an extended and static visual response to the Treves Fountain sequence in Italian film director Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita is obvious. The Smile (1993) similarly reminds a film-buff of Swedish director Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers. But the point to note is that the knowledge of the referent is no clue to the full appreciation of the painting in view, although the referent might have functioned as a take-off point, as in Raktakarabi, or a supportive visual, as in Before the Fountain. Pyne has never been an illustrator of a painter, although he has been an amazingly creative illustrator1 of literary texts. No prior knowledge of the referents is necessary for the appreciation of the static visual texts which Pyne composes, although that helps to appreciate the richness of the viewed text, like an acquaintance with Dante’s Divine Comedy makes the appreciation of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel mural richer. Yet, it is this intrinsic narrativity of Ganesh Pyne’s non-performative visual art that stands on his way to be accepted as a modern master by votaries of derivative Modernism.

In the mythology of Modernism, the autonomy of each art, absolute disassociation of each art from other arts and total dependence of each-art on the sensuousness of the art-specific visual inputs, in the making of an art object, were so sacrosanct axioms that any trace of narrativity in painting and sculpture was considered as pre-Modern, or at best Modern with some backlog. Yet, it is a fact that not all genres of Eurogenetic and transAtlantic Modern art could stay clear of all forms of narrativity. There were narrative elements in the works of various early schools of Expressionism.

But then, the Expressionists of all hues made narration secondary to expression of emotion— chromatically and/or by gestural application of art-specific physical inputs. Moreover, a Pyne work always is an elaborate construction, unlike an instantaneous outpouring that an Expressionist work ideally is. During the three-quarter century of high-noon of Western Modernism, narrativity in non-performing visual arts survived either as conservative non-acceptance, as seen in the works of the artists like Egon Schele and James Ensore et. al., or as leftist resistance against Modernist norms—ranging from Surrealism to the Mexican kind of monumental realism. But then their narratology had family resemblances with what in contemporary literature are given names like: stream of consciousness, interior monologue, fractured narrative, non-sequential narrative, etc., none of which fits Pyne’s kind of narration.

Ganesh Pyne’s narratology is of older vintage.

His miniature-sized paintings are too spacedeficient to accommodate muralish multiepisodes with multiple focal points to build a sequential narration. Nor are his paintings like Akbari miniatures, with different pictorial events having different perspectives to be viewed from different angles. Pyne’s works are not only physically compact but also meaningfully dense.

Pyne builds his narration by suggestion and

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Facing page and below: Ardhakathanaka Drawings Pen and ink 1980

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The Conversation (detail) Tempera 1977

and the physiology of illusory perception. It is this deviation from scientific principles of simulation of phenomenal naturalness and creation of an illusion of naturalness that helps make Pyne’s use of light-and-darkness extremely effective in creating a sense of mystery. It is the same strategy Rabindranath Tagore adopted for his paintings. As Pyne creates the effects of mystery with varying intensities of light and darkness, he chooses his colours in accordance with their light and/or darkness content, rather than for their chromatic effect. As Pyne stays away from all techniques of creation of visual illusion, he does not lay colours in graded tones. Pyne’s almost signature mode of bright-and-sombre, warm-and-cool colour texture weaving—by specking, stippling, hatching and cross-hatching, etc.—are precisely for the creation of the effect of light from indeterminate source and non-shade, non-shadow darkness. Pyne’s concept of inter-penetration of binary opposites pervades his use of light-and-darkness too.

Having enumerated the visually identifiable (sensuous) modes and manners by which Ganesh Pyne’s paintings, sketches and drawings attract immediate attention and induce the viewer to read those closely, we need to pay attention to another quality of his work which is visual only in an extended sense, but nevertheless visually felt.

The poet and filmmaker Buddhadeb Dasgupta in his film on Pyne has called him a “painter of eloquent silence”. Normally, the visual arts do not stimulate aural sensation. Modernist arts swear by appeal to particular sense. Yet Charles Baudelaire would long for correspondence of sensuous appeal of one art to another across sensual divides. With a discussion on how Pyne achieved this, we enter the realm of visual linguistics for the realization of Pyne’s vision. A cloudless day-sky, an expanse of calm sea under mid-day sun, a vast area of flat land on a bright day, an expanse of a human habitat

GANESH 17 PYNE

enveloped in twilight haze, and a dimly lit rural landscape half-obliterated by nocturnal darkness do not normally denote any association either with sound or soundlessness. Yet the absence of any sound-making agent, and/or sounding agents past their capacities of making any sound, expanses of soundless half-visible space, etc. tend to evoke the sensation of silence. But that feeling of soundlessness is never complete. It is always a disturbed silence—disturbed by sounds of inarticulate whispers, like half-revealed objects in twilight darkness. The silence in that situation is eloquent with ominous half sounds.

The enumeration so far of the factored general visual stimulants in Pyne’s work induce further, closer and deeper readings of his imagery, spatial configuration and light-and-darkness effects.

Considering his conceptual understanding of the duality of phenomenal reality it may be rewarding to diagnose how Pyne objectified his understanding, while one is engaged in deep reading of a Ganesh Pyne text (a painting, a sketch or a drawing), by pursuing all the visual clues provided therein.

Let us first take the character-denoting images.

Including the birds and the animals, most of his human actors are lonesome beings. In the paintings like The Conversation (1977) and the Smile (1993) where more than one character is found, they either belong to different species or are in different states of life and mortality, as in Saint and the Carcass (1988). More complex is the King, Queen and the Jester (1976). Each of the three characters is styled so differently as if belonging to different species, and stands on the ground separated from the others as if living in its own world, in spite of being in close proximity to others spatially. Another painting Raktakarabi, painted in the same decade, too is a complex composition of three characters: a standing woman in the foreground, a dead body

Ancient Man I Watercolour 1950s

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differentiate it from its phenomenal equivalent.

More important, however, is the mode of morphological transformation Pyne resorts to. In tune with his intention of construction of fables, Pyne makes his key images visually metaphoric.

For him metaphoric images are micro-level building blocks for macro-level fables. But then, Pyne’s metaphorical images are of several different types. The playing-card metaphor of the apparel of The Magician (1989) is simple enough. But not so simple is the fish or reptile skeleton suggestion given to the sarangi of The Fiddler (1990). Yet more complex is the effect of the metaphoric on the whole-image. The Assassin’s bright rib-cage projects out of his dark shrouded body, while he chases a wispy jewel-like apparition (if it is of a victim or of a vengeful, one knows not).

How and with what kind of intention Pyne conjures up his metaphors to construct a fable that at the end is an extended metaphor can be seen by undertaking an exercise in the deconstruction of any Pyne text, say, The Harbour (1971).3 The forestay of the skeletal ship adrift, towards the harbour, has the look of a face-down drowned man—making the ghostly ship an abandoned man-of-war. It floats rudderless towards a rocky promontory where evidently a lighthouse should have been to warn the approaching ship of perilous hidden rocks. However, in its stead, there stands a tulsi-mancha with a sacred basil plant on it; the tulsi-mancha is also a pedestal for an oil lamp left lit by some unknown devotees to dispel evening darkness; the flame is too feeble. The mancha or the pedestal for the sacred plant and the ritual lamp, however, looks like a skull in the evening half-light. The sacred and hopeful for some, and dead and ominous for others enigmatically coexist in the image. If it is destiny that attracts the agent of death to its inevitable doom or the retributive power of sacred that attracts the evil to its doom,

Pyne does not answer; he leaves it to the viewer– reader. Pyne’s visualization of all these conceptual complexities is so smooth and the surface treatment so enchanting that probing the depth for unraveling the mystery contained in narration comes only as response to the titillation that the painting causes.

However, the question is what motivates Pyne to construct such elaborate fables block by block.

The deconstruction of The Harbour (1971) text has already thrown up some kind of an answer. It is thus: by distancing the painted narrative from the phenomenal event, Pyne builds a parable that suggests or evokes a highly generalized assessment of what really happens, what kind of causes lead to what kind of effects; how does such cause-effect cycle affect human existence, etc. In the ancient and medieval India, there were aestheticians, writing in Sanskrit, who would prefer the arts to be paroksha, referring to the phenomenal world only indirectly. Pyne seems to follow their advice.

We have already seen that Ganesh Pyne, in his work, does not represent any particular phenomenon, phenomenal event or situation, even from a very personalized point of view, employing editorial vision and editing techniques.

Yet, strangely, or as one would like to say— mysteriously, to the viewer–reader the imagery and the painted events or situations of Pyne’s work bring back personal memories and/or knowledge of parallel objects and events of real life situations. Referents are indirect or paroksha. But, then, howsoever paroksha or indirect the visual manifestations on surface are, they are so because Pyne desired them that way. More often than not, Pyne’s imagery and painted events/situations have their referents in his worldly experience, not only as a perceptive man of the world, but also as a voracious reader, discerning film buff, theatregoer, observer of visual arts and listener of others’

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The Assassin (Detail) Tempera 1979

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Left to right: Jottings Pen and ink 1997 Jottings Pen and ink 1997

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Clockwise: Banalata Sen Mixed media 1998 Jottings Pen and ink 1992 Untitled Pen and Ink 1989

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tales. Clues to all these various roles are embedded in Pyne’s work, to be deciphered by the perceptive viewer–reader. For the verification of authenticity of the statement, we can go back once again to our discourse on The Harbour.

The Harbour (1971), a tempera on cloth, was exhibited only once in September 1971, at Birla Academy of Art, Calcutta, in a fundraising exhibition for the benefit of Bangladeshi artists taking shelter in India during that country’s War of Liberation (1971). Although an occasional work, it does not refer directly to the liberation struggle or its effect; yet the painting indeed had its take-off point in the Bangladeshi muktiyuddha (Bangladesh liberation war). Sometime in August 1971, news of a debilitating attack on a Pakistani gunboat, near a Bangladesh harbour, by the naval commandos of mukti-bahini was flashed in Calcutta press. An avid newspaper reader, with usual Bengali interest in contemporary political events, the news attracted Pyne’s interest. There are/were contemporary ‘jottings’—Pyne’s style of keeping visual and/or lettered notes of whatever interested him—to prove that the report of the event indeed had a triggering effect on his imagination.

In imagination, the unseen modern gunboat got transformed into the imaginary image of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “painted ship on a painted ocean”—the adrift skeletal ship of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner Pyne had read as a school student, before his entry into the second year class of the Government College of Art and Craft, Calcutta. However, by no stretch of imagination can one associate Coleridge’s stranded ship with a drowning man that Pyne has done with his ship image. Based on the evidence of a number of contemporary ‘jottings’ with lettered texts, and another painting one can deduce that the floating drowning-man image is Pyne’s visual translation of his friend Shakti Chattopadhyay’s line: “jaley bhese jaye kar sab” (whose corpse is it that floats

away in tide) from the poem Ami Swechchhachari (I am Debouch). With consummate artistry Pyne seamlessly fuses the image constructs of referents from diverse sources on discovering their compatibility and complementarity. This not only gives to his narration richness, but also levels of meaningfulness. The point, however, is that the images and images in spatial configuration get so transformed in Pyne’s work that their connections to specific referents, irrespective of their source in the world of objects and events, or in other arts, become secondary. Yet, the strong morphological suggestiveness of Pyne’s imagery and configuration inevitably leads the viewer to search for referents and finding those enhances the richness of the viewing experience.

While on suggestiveness of visual text to resultant effect of life experience objectified by morphology of imagery, inter-positioning of images and overall configuration, Pyne’s break with sectarian, parochial tradition and assertion of universal in tradition is another proof of his modernity of mind, the lack of which makes any surface semblance to any apparent Modernism sham. Pyne’s modernity is the modernity of an individual in a transitional traditional society, not outside it. There is a tempera painting from the ’70s vintage, titled the Footprint. It shows a man in a ritual robe of an unspecific religious sect, lying prostate on ground, of what seems to be a place of religious worship, with outstretched hands trying to touch an oversized Footprint—in reverse-relief.

The Footprint is in less bright yellow and the surrounding edifice–interior is in half-darkness.

Knowing Pyne’s family background the place of worship could have more likeness to a Vaishnava shrine and the man’s robe could look like that of a Gaudiya Vaishnava Sannyasi. But that would be against Pyne’s intention. In footprint-veneration, irrespective of whether the print is conceived of as Buddha’s—the Enlightened, or the Kadam of

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Harbour (detail) Tempera 1971

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The Prince Tempera Early 1960s

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Rasool, or Chaitanya—the Supremely Conscious, Pyne saw a universal motivation: to submit the self to be led by the enlightened deified hero, to defeat the forces of darkness and death, as they say: mahajano jena gato sa pantha (the path charted by great men). This one painting, like quite a few others, confirms our assessment of Pyne the individualist painter and his relation to tradition— ethnic, cultural and territorial. It is apparent from his work that he is not an ‘outsider’ or an ‘exile’ in a Modernist sense. He is never averse to appropriate aspects and elements, both contentwise and linguistic, from cultural and territorial traditions, which according to his judgement have wider human validity and/or contemporary relevance.

Antonio Gramsci would perhaps call Ganesh Pyne an organic intellectual with disinterested respect for cultural tradition. Let us return from the digression to the main discourse.

While suggestiveness is the essential instrument of allegory, parable, fable-like visual narratives, evocation of meaning (remember, I.A. Richards’ distinction between referential and evocative meaning)4 by means of generation of feeling is an effective supportive strategy of communication. The feeling of light and the feeling of darkness, with all their intermediaries, are perceptibly used by Pyne for evocation of meaningfulness, not only in his paintings, but also in drawings and sketches. Here we need a little meaningful digression into Pyne’s pick from art history relevant to him.

Speaking on his debt to the history of painting Pyne would, time and again, talk of aspects of Abanindranath’s, Rembrandt’s and Paul Klee’s work. Later, he would add Ganganendranath’s and Rabindranath’s paintings to his list. While Abanindranath’s linear approach to delineation of image did have a palpable effect on Pyne it could not have been the factor that so profoundly

affected his visual-linguistics. Abanindranath’s almost total disregard of chiaroscuro (except in the portraits and masks in pastel, done late in life) and use of shadowless, all-over light, which he learnt from Mughal naturalism, were lessons Pyne would never forget.5 It indeed was the kind of pictorial light that did not create an illusion of reality, and thereby helped the generation of a feeling of mystery by not conforming to the natural perception of optical illusion. This perhaps led Pyne in his choice of influence. Why then did Pyne consider Rembrandt, the master of chiaroscuro, as one of his preceptors? For his pictorial compositions Rembrandt was in the habit of creating several identified sources of light within the frames of the pictures, like lit-lanterns, naked flaming lamps, shiny metals reflecting light, against the usual chiaroscaroistic practice of light from one definite source travelling one-directionally, resulting in one-directional shades, shadows and cast-shadows. Light from multiple sources in Rembrandt’s paintings, drawings and prints not only gives multi-directional shades and shadows but also tends to make the resultant darkness— darknesses of varying intensities. This treatment of light-and-shade tends to generate, in the viewer of Rembrandt’s work, a feeling of mystery. It is precisely this feeling of mystery that led the poet and man of letters Buddhadeb Bose to speak of Rembrandt’s darkness as more significant than his light in the essay ‘Je Andhar Alor Adhik’ (The Darkness that is Greater than Light) (1958). Paul Klee’s series of abstract paintings, based on NorthAfrican landscape and the New York Boogy-Woogy on the nocturnal skyline of New York, fascinated Ganesh Pyne, for in these he could observe how the artist objectified the effect of varying intensities of darkness on perception; how falling light transformed landscapes and cityscapes into substanceless configuration of forms. Pyne’s debt to Klee is also palpable in the latter’s seemingly half-finished caricaturish sketches, drawn in sharp

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Anti-clockwise: Shuo-Rani (The Favorite Queen) Watercolour 1953 Untitled Pen and ink 1982 Untitled Pen and ink 1982

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cannot be termed as disjunctive. For, first, the mature Pyne would often fall back upon the quality of line Abanindranath used to define the contours of image, especially the images of living beings.

Second, the lessons on the creation of light-anddarkness effect in painting that he had learnt from Abanindranath helped him to devise his own idiom of light-and-darkness effect. Pyne’s respect for tradition is not conditioned by its function of maintenance of ethnic and/or territorial and/or religious sectarian identity. Usability of elements from tradition has been, for Pyne, the measure of relevance of a tradition, any tradition, not only insofar his visual linguistics was concerned, but also in his general societal attitude, as can be gleaned from his work. Pyne’s narratology usually does not display any reference to sectarian religious mythology, apart from a few oblique evocations of association with Bengali folk oral tradition, although his narratives are resplendent with mythic aura. His iconic images (there are aplenty) hardly ever bear resemblance to any known sacred icon. The deity-less shrines of his paintings, like the one in Saint and the Carcass (1988), are more like the small nondescript shrine across the road near Pyne’s ancestral home than architecturally identifiable sacred edifices of some religious sect.

Pyne left enough indications in his work for him to be considered as a secular individual, respectful, and with an eagerness to know the motivations of the believer. This eagerness to know others while being confident about self-realization makes Pyne a modern mind of non-Western origin.

Was Ganesh Pyne a gloomy person of a creative individual, as his overwhelming concern with the phenomenon of death tends to indicate? A close scrutiny of Pyne’s work does not warrant such a conclusion. In our ongoing analysis of some of his work we have seen that Pyne’s concern with duality of forces, of life and death, light and darkness, evil and sacred, violence and peacefulness, has

been so integral to his way of thinking that it is difficult to say that his concern with death was overwhelming. Admittedly, however, in many a work the forces of death do get visual priority, darkness seems to envelop the flickering lamp and failing light, the violent forces threaten peace and tranquility, evoke the quietude of graveyard.

If all these did not make an artist gloomy, he had to be an artist fully immersed in art only, by remaining totally unconcerned with life. Even when he was concerned with death, he could not always feel gloomy or have an unmixed feeling of dread. In men of war’s drift towards doom (cf. The Harbour) and in The Assassin’s wait for and chase of the attractive chimera of death Pyne found an element of retribution which for him was enough reason to pack into the paintings some celebratory mood. Ganesh Pyne’s world of imagination was so full of observation of and reflection on the spatiotemporally lived life that it often drove him to make judgements. But he never allowed his work to become judgemental. A moralizing stance he never took as an artist. And that precisely is the reason why in his work he appears to be a gloomy person. However, consideration being given to his dual-consciousness, the low-keyed celebratory stance of his work would not be missed, alongside the obvious gloom.

In Ganesh Pyne’s work we do not so much as see Ganesh Pyne, the man and his emotions, as much as we see his response to the predicament of beings around him. His own being has seldom been the first person singular number. From the Two Brothers, painted in 1954, to The Wooden Horse painted in 1997, Ganesh Pyne’s self-image features in a number of paintings and ‘jottings’.

Everywhere he is in company of other beings and things, with enough visual clues to the nature and intensities of relationships. The mood that we decipher from the presentation of each self-image doubtlessly is the resultant effect of the relation

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Untitled Tempera 1962

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with beings and objects variously depicted. So for Ganesh Pyne, relationship with others and outside objects is a cause of joy and sadness. However, a large number of his work tends to narrate the tales of once joyous relationships becoming reasons for sadness and gloomy thought. As the great novelist Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay had said, in his book Anandamath, “thinking about what mother was, and what she has become, makes one either morose or rebellious.” For Ganesh Pyne the choice was not between his self’s being and nothingness of death. He became the person we glean from his work, by experiencing what his world was becoming. His own existence as an individual and as an artist has been as a participant–observer

of the process of becoming. But the participant– observer has been Ganesh Pyne’s first person singular number. Ganesh Pyne’s art remains testimony to that.

1. Ganesh Pyne has been an avid literary text illustrator and book cover designer, all through his life. His penchant for narrativity gave him an advantage there. In fact, it is through the illustrations that Pyne did in 1980 for his friend Mukund Lath’s Ardhakathanak that he reached his signature style of figuration—straight-linear, angular, stern and flat. Pyne, a figurative painter per se, did not have a signature style of figure representation, a must for a figurative painter, till then.

exhibition, about which I will presently speak. Remaining unsold in the show, Pyne gifted the painting to me. I, later, persuaded Lalit Kala Akademi to make a same-size display print, the printing of which I supervised. In 2006, a fake of it reached the Christies for auction which, however, was withdrawn at the last moment at my intervention. The treasure remains with me.

2. The term weltanschauung comes from classical German philosophy, roughly translated into English it would mean worldview. The Bengali term bhuodarshan, too, means the same.

5. The concept of chiaroscuro, although had a strong basis in the physics of optics and psychology of illusoriness of perception, was also a product of light-and-shade perception in the temperate climatic zone, which is different from what it is in the tropics.

To get the ambient and almost shadowless light and darkness of the tropics, Satyajit Ray and his cinematographer Subrata Mitra devised the methods of bounced light and filtered light, as early as during the shooting of Pather Panchali.

3. My personal relation with the painting started in August 1971 when it was being conceived through “jottings”, as Pyne would normally do. He would tell me about how he was conceiving it.

Having known that, I had asked him to exhibit the work in a special

The lonely travellers and other actors of Ganesh Pyne works have never been his alter ego, nor were his works auto-biographic, even in an extended sense. But the journeys of lonely travellers into unknown adverse territories, as Pyne’s observed-to-conceptualized archetypal characters undertook, was the one that a conscientious artist of a colonial and post-colonial world like Ganesh Pyne was destined to undertake.

4 . I A Richards, C K Ogden, Principles of Literary Criticism (1926)

“Is it beauty alone which creates pain?

From what depths of heart can we feel pain and attribute it to beauty?�

(An inscription from a Pyne jotting)

1950s

GANESH 37 PYNE

Two Brothers Watercolour 1955

38 PLATES 1950s

Pranabranjan Ray Pranabranjan Ray (b.1934), art scribe, graduated from Visva Bharati, Santiniketan and got his Masters degree from Calcutta University, in social sciences. He has worked as a social scientist for the Government of West Bengal. He has been a founder member and the secretary of the Society of Contemporary Artist, Calcutta, for 25 years.

He had served as the guest lecturer at the Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S. University of Baroda, Kala Bhavan, Visva Bharati University, Santiniketan and as visiting Professor, Faculty of Visual Arts, Rabindra Bharati University, Calcutta. He was a commissioner for the Indian Section of the 1978 Delhi International Triennale and had also been a member of the Editorial Board of Lalit Kala Contemporary. Ray had been a member of the Advisory Committee of the Roopankar Museum, Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal. He was art critic of a number of Indian dailies and weeklies. Pranabranjan Ray has written over a hundred research papers for seminars, conferences and lectures which got published in prestigious journals and anthologies, on the visual arts, artists, cinema and social sciences. He has also authored several books and curated a number of exhibitions. He has conceptualised, done research, written scripts and commentary for a number of documentary films on visual arts and artists. He has worked extensively on works of artists like Rabindranath Tagore, Gaganendranath Tagore, Jamini Roy, Ramkinkar Baij, Somnath Hore, Ganesh Pyne, Bikash Bhattacharjee et.al. Ray has been close to Ganesh Pyne for over four decades.

MODERN & CONTEMPORARY ART

Ganesh Pyne

136 pages, 68 colour illustrations 9.5 x 11” (241 x 280 mm), hc ISBN: 978-93-85360-21-3 ₹2000 | $37.50 | £25 2018 • World rights

Printed in India

A Painter of Eloquent Silence Pranabranjan Ray