The Metamorphosis of Pyne
Ganesh Pyne, the celebrated artist from Bengal, remains an enigma for many. A self confessed recluse, Pyne’s work has drawn accolades from world over and yet a comprehensive survey of his works is rarely witnessed or discussed. The artist rarely attended the inaugurations of his own exhibitions, preferring to remain away from the limelight, which not only drew criticism from the art world which considered him to be an arrogant intellectual, but also made the artist a subject of many myths. He rarely traveled outside Bengal, and isolated himself from the Kolkata art world as well. An artist who started actively painting in the early sixties, and whose work captured the imagination of many art lovers and influenced generations of Bengal painters, there is very little published or documented on him, it is only in recent years that Pyne’s exhibitions have traveled beyond the borders of Bengal, with his work being contextualized with the social history of Bengal.
The book, Thirst of a Minstrel, written by Shiladitya Sarkar, an art critic and artist, based in Mumbai, opens up many vistas to the artist’s personality and work, and sifting through the strands of mere concoction, Sarkar presents an intimate biographical account of Pyne, starting from his childhood, across his years of painful struggle, and to his final recognition as one of India’s most sought after artists, a living legend in the domain of Indian art. Presented with rare visuals, the book delineates the many subtle nuances that is the foundation of Pyne’s creative milieu, and focuses on the ways his art was shaped through the turbulent socio political dynamics of the 1960’s to the 1980’s.
Ganesh Pyne was born in 1937, in a middle-class family, sketching and doodling right from his childhood. The author starts the book with an intimate description of Pyne’s ancestral house, Kaviraj Row, in which Pyne spent most of his life and whose interwoven stories, nooks and corners, light and shadows found expression in his art. The story-telling sessions of his grand-mother, drawn from folklore and mythology, captivated the young Pyne, pushing the experiences of an urban milieu to the peripheries of his imagination. An osmosis of these fictional tales and its microcosms, its many protagonists and secrets, permeate Pyne’s monochromatic existence. To paraphrase Sarkar, like Franz Kafka who chronicled the nightmares of the 20th century from Prague, Pyne’s world is also limited, they begin with and end within the boundaries of Kaviraj Row and the city of Kolkata. “This enclosed space and his paintings define him to the exclusion of all else. The rest is silence”. There are no scandals, no quirkiness of a flamboyant artist, Pyne’s austere life is very private, “glimpsed no more than fleeting snapshots”.
The author spent long hours with the artist and finds him to be a very engaging conversationalist, but Pyne converses with only a few, his dialogue remains intimate with his canvas. A member of a large joint family, Pyne often spent time alone, which allowed him to dream at will. The fantasy and abstraction of myths, jatra performances, the sounds and smells of a turbulent metropolis, the happenings at Kaviraj Row, the famine of 1943 and the communal riots of 1946 left an indelible mark on Pyne’s psyche. Also the political instability of the 1960’s mirrored Kolkata’s economic hardships, civic problems and rampant unemployment, and Pyne survived in this extremely uncertain phase as an unemployed artist, going through periods of severe depression, the outer and inner, street and home meeting at various points, yet he painted relentlessly, deep into the night, pen and ink works when he did not have the money to buy paints, or watercolours and tempera when he has some economic source, offering no rhetoric to the world, allowing only the living images of his paintings to form a dialogue with the public.
The author then charts out Pyne’s unique love life and creative trajectories from the early years where Pyne was drawn to the work of Abanindranath and Gaganendranath Tagore, and later to the influence of international trends of Surrealism, Expressionism and Cubism, etchings of European painters and Rembrant’s chiaroscuros, while still steeped in the folkloric imagination and story-telling traditions of India. Themes of alienation and death and existential philosophy became signature in his work, which continued to his late phase as well. Two factors saved him from obscurity, art groups like the Painter’s and Sculptors’ Association, formed in 1963 but which broke up soon, and his longer association with the Society of Contemporary Artists’ (SOCA), which was formed in 1960. The annual displays of this organization and the role played by this organization in promoting Calcutta artists, including Ganesh Pyne, right through the 60’s and 70’s, and secondly, the individual enthusiasm of discerning collectors brought Pyne into the public arena.
Films and Theatre, along with folk and contemporary literature, provided Pyne with the raw materials of his work, along with the “correlation that exists between myths and the collective unconscious”. A rare and lucidly written book, with poetic metaphors, Sarkar sifts the man from the myth, revealing a monumental creative persona, that struggled against all odds and emerged victorious, yet remaining humble in his success; a book worth collecting for all art lovers.
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