Anjolie Ela Menon may be one of India’s best known artists. yet At 70, she is still looking for a new direction in her work.
There is an engaging pertness to Anjolie Ela Menon that belies her 70 years. Dressed in a brown sari with cheerful yellow and green accents, her brow almost unlined around the trademark high bindi, and her “vanity” intact — “Only high shots, please” she pleads with the photographer — she is articulate and assertive, as she has a reputation for being. “I am not looking back yet, I am looking forward,” she says firmly. “The time may come, when I am 80 perhaps, but not yet...”
Perhaps yes, but then 70 is an important milestone in the life of one of India’s most successful artists and Delhi’s Vadehra Art Gallery will be marking her birthday (July 16) with a book, a biggish coffee-tabler, part-biography, part-critique, part-picture book. There will also be an exhibition of around sixty works — many of them done over the last 3-4 years, but also a few that go far back into her long, 55-year-old career as a painter.
This is Menon’s first solo exhibition in four years. The hiatus was deliberate, says Menon. “I took the decision about two years ago to drop out of the scene. I found I was becoming a prize commodity and that’s the last thing I want to be. I needed this time out to think, to contemplate, to see what my next direction was going to be.”
She’s been working, of course, and travelling the world as she’s done all her life — “Paris, London, Bangkok, China… I’ve just come back from Washington and New York” In her painting, she says, she’s been “absorbing an influence that has moved me greatly”. These pertain to an impulse visit to the Ardhkumbh in 2007 where she had “a glimpse into the secret life of the naked Naga sadhus who converge…in their thousands only to mysteriously disappear thereafter — till the next Kumbh” (Isana Murti in Anjolie Ela Menon: Through the Patina, Vadehra Art Gallery, 2010, Rs 4,500). The result: a series of canvases of sadhus “flying off their chariots and leaping into the water”, dynamic figures that are a marked change from the still, often iconic subjects that Menon has mostly painted thus far.
If this is a change in direction, a new phase, as Menon implies it is, then it is in keeping with her belief that an artist must keep re-inventing herself — within, of course, the bounds of the “unique signature” that mark her style.
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“It’s very hard,” she says. “There is the temptation to go on producing the same thing year after year because in this commercial scene, if you have found a successful commodity you don’t want to abandon it. But every time something has become well known, well liked, I have wanted to abandon it.”
She’s done it too, experimenting with form, medium and style, many a time. “The 90s, especially,” she says “were full of experiments, very bold, sometimes reckless even.” To flag the major ones — there was the painted furniture series, followed by the sculptures in crystal Murano glass and the engagement with kitsch, and an exhibition of computer-generated art in the interim.
“That was very well received in New York [where it showed]. Here it was not — people were baffled by it. It was in a sense ahead of its time.” Be that as it may, Menon did create a splash with her new media art; in fact, in this, she may even be credited with setting off a trend for free-wheeling experimentation that has become a sine qua non with many a contemporary artist.
Menon confesses that she was initially skeptical about the trend in contemporary Indian art towards new media, especially sculptural installations, because she found most of the artists were plagiarising the West, taking advantage of the fact that viewers in India had then not travelled to see the originals. But she’s happier with the younger lot of contemporaries, “those like Subodh and Bharti who are using the new medium with indigenous ideas and making a break internationally”.
The question of whether these will last, given that there aren’t many museums to preserve them, still bothers her. But as she says, “There are maybe two lakh artists in this country today, many trends, many things happening simultaneously and in this there is room for everyone.”
As for herself, Menon says she would now, “in the short working life left”, like to concentrate on art works for public spaces. Paintings, she’s found, “disappear into private collections and you never see them again. They are accessible to so few people.”
Trained as a fresco painter at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, Paris, Menon has executed many large murals through her career — a 20’X8’ fibre-glass work for a metro station in Kolkata, the city she was born in, a fresco at the Uttar Pradesh state secretariat, another at the LIC Building in Vishakhapatnam, and many others at hotels, restaurants and airports through the country. She’s just finished one at the Mumbai airport and has been commissioned for another, 40-foot wall at the new terminal coming up. It’s hard work requiring months of strenuous, painstaking labour perched on high scaffoldings and Menon says she likes to do it all herself. It’s a “blue collar job”, Menon says. “You have to have the energy…and I want to do as much as I can as long as I have the strength.”