Airiness and fluidity

L Munuswamy has created his own inimitable style of free-flowing lines, says Kishore Singh

It is ironic that some of our greatest artists were first fed on a diet not of masters but of the popular and, now, obsolete art of banner painters "" or cinema hoardings.

M F Husain famously worked as a hoardings painter in Mumbai, but in distant Madras, another artistic temperament was being shaped by these artists.

Born in a Vishwakarma family embryonically linked to Chennai's Mylapore temple, Lingachari Munuswamy learnt what little he knew of art as an adolescent from the masters who ran their studios as art directors, but who stopped short of sharing their secrets with young novitiates.

Nor was this merely a beginner's naïve start to a journey for the masters were erudite, articulate, and what they lacked by way of access to art galleries and museums, they more than made up poring over copies of Illustrated London News and discussions about ideas and techniques.

"I can't tell you the conversations we had about the green stripe down the nose of Matisse's wife..." he recalls in the book The Drifting Horizon (Geeta Doctor) launched recently to coincide with an exhibition of his work from the 1950s to the '80s at the Delhi Art Gallery in the capital. Interestingly, in his works from the '60s, Munuswamy used tints of green in his oils.

Always reticent, shy in company, and lost in the alien world of Chennai (so far from the aggressively art-friendly centres of Bombay and Delhi), Munuswamy's chequered career (a student at Government College of Arts and Crafts, where he was later teacher and principal, and a stint at teaching students art at Lawrence School, Lovedale) was the background to his painting: "I have been through all these different phases, Impressionistic, Fauvist, Cubist, Surrealist, Minimalist..."

It's easy enough to see, yes, but Munuswamy has finally created his own, inimitable and distinctive style of free flowing lines without sharp edges or, even to an extent, a beginning or an end.

The journey, Munuswamy says, is not about shocking people so much as creating an Indian identity without it being covertly so, since that might be a conscious effort "which would be artificial, not truly Indian".

"In his most mature phase, Munuswamy arrived at a style without angles and straight lines," writes art critic Roobina Karode, "the undulating rhythms of his elephant and lotus forms became characteristic of the airiness and fluidity of his pictorial world."

Age has slowed down the 80-year-old, but his exuberance lives on in the playfully drawn lines of his paintings. The subjects are sometimes light, but just as often they seethe with intensity "" not unlike the artist himself.