Kolkata’s artists come to the capital to pitch for recognition and acknowledgement.
When Kumari Selja says that “We” — presumably, art-lovers throughout the country — “look to Kolkata as the crucible of art,” it is difficult to disagree with her. It was here that the first interface between the coloniser and the colonised played out in a cultural clash that led to Indian artists changing from the traditional miniature format to the then-alien oil-and-canvas. Not without some resistance, though — so that the Kalighat pat painters reflected the changing milieu in their broad outlines, while engravers and printers around the city created early lithographs, chromolithographs and oleographs based entirely on mythology.
The call for a nationalistic idiom on the rebound took its emerging language of the “wash” technique from Japan, and when Bombay emerged to take a dominant position based on Western influences, Calcutta came back with a more flexible approach that was open to ideas from early India, from the East and the West, but concerned itself with immediate issues around it, and was, in that sense, “modern”. It was certainly different from Bombay —reflecting the milieu around it in its works on the famine, on Partition and on politics. But the Bombay Progressives were more aggressive, which resulted in the launch, in 1960, of the Contemporary Society of Artists, in Calcutta.
Some years later, Prokash Karmakar and Bijan Chowdhury broke away from the Society and along with four other artists, and two Delhi-based ones, held a show of the Calcutta-8 at AIFACS in the capital in January 1963, returning to the venue again in December that year. Because the press referred to them as the “Calcutta painters”, the appellation became the name of the group they now formed, and it is they — for the first time since 1963, and in its 47th outing — who are back in New Delhi’s Lalit Kala Akademi with 28 members, including Jogen Chowdhury and Isha Mohammad, Rabin Mondal, Dhiren Chowdhury, Barun Roy, Suvaprasanna, Amalnath Chakladar, Tapan Ghosh, Tapan Mitra and Pradeep Mondal, among others.
Founding member Prokash Karmakar is at hand, explaining that the group’s longevity is based on creative addabaazi rather than any rigid ideology. Certainly, says Barun Roy, whose abstract still-lifes have an amorphous feel, its members have experimented with their own individual styles without feeling in any way stifled. Arguably, it is this “freedom” that becomes a curatorial challenge — especially in Kolkata, where the artistic expression of the 1950s and 1960s remains the aesthetic benchmark still in the new century.
How different is the Calcutta Painters’ 47th edition from its first or, indeed, say, 15th or 39th exhibition? There is a certain predictability to a Kolkata show — the nuanced stylisation that was criticised some decades back but which is enjoying a revival now based on an appreciation of its evolved aesthetic — that has a thoughtfulness born of consideration and patience. Kolkata painters are rarely in a hurry, which is why transitions are a slow process, and rarely for the sake of change alone. While this can be good, it does rob a group show of a surprise element.
Karmakar, for instance, rarely disappoints — just as he rarely shocks. If anything stands out, it is Rabin Mondal’s disembodied heads floating above the protagonists of his Drama Series, Bipin Goswami’s sculptures, Gautam Bhowmick’s van Gogh-ish figurative works, Barun Roy’s artful forms, Shyamasree Basu’s abstractions that allow stories to speak through the layers, Subhabrata Nandi’s canvases that are balanced within storytelling spaces, and Tapan Ghosh’s excellent pencil work. It would be uncharitable to be critical of some artists whose work is heavily reminiscent of those better known, while a few remain merely illustrative. But there’s comfort to be derived from Dhiraj Chowdhury’s Modigliani-esque figures of sages and clowns, Jogen Chowdhury’s heads and still-lifes, Tapan Mitra’s sunlit abstracts, and Wasim Kapoor’s ode to Mother Teresa that leads you to linger over the excellent portraits.
This must be said — any outing of any group of Kolkata artists is likely to be a capsule history of the range and extent of Indian art. The Calcutta Painters’ third outing in Delhi certainly lives up to and delivers on that promise with works that range from the nostalgic and sentimental to the experimental and bold. Whether it arrives at its 50th edition from that meditative space, or in ferment, could be a pointer to whether it considers itself part of, or distinct from, the rest of Indian art.
The Calcutta Painters’ 47th annual exhibition is on view at Lalit Kala Akademi, Rabindra Bhavan, New Delhi, 11am-7pm, till Dec 28