Bengali summer

DESIGN

The spring-summer cusp, instead of putting an end to art events, appears to have escalated them instead. And if you thought the Paresh Maity book coinciding with his exhibition on Kerala and written by Ravi Shankar (Art Alive, Rs 4,000) was the last of the season past, two new books have underlined the growing market for monographs on artists.

Haren Das, The End of Toil (Delhi Art Gallery, Rs 1,500) is a landscape-sized book on the prints (woodcuts, engravings, etchings) of arguably India's most consistent printmaker.

Having embraced the form that was not then, or now, considered high art, Haren Das (with Chittaprosad and Somnath Hore), "at a time when graphic artists in India were almost non-existent and nearly everyone painted in oils", writes Paula Sengupta, "chose dedicatedly to be a printmaker".

The highlight of the book is the collection of prints spanning his entire career (1945-90), culled from various sources. A must-have for not just for the artist's repertoire but also for the history of printmaking it outlines.

In search of beauty

More recent is The Art of Amitabha Banerjee, Imprints Off a Sensitive Soul by Manasij Majumder (Akar Prakar, Rs 750), on another printmaker and graphic artist who, not surprisingly, was equally adept as a painter.

Schooled in "academic realism" (which would assist him when he worked as a billboard painter), working with "realistic watercolours" in washes as well as opaque watercolour, he would develop into an observer "for meticulous documentary details".

Though he did experiment briefly with abstraction, "his visual perception of the world abroad was too strong to allow him to eliminate all references to the reality beyond the image frame".

Two images recur in his work "" women, representing a "social reality" focused not just on the subject but "on a totality of expression" and often in "a pensive mood", and birds for their "formal beauty" as also for their "metaphorical and symbolic meaning". Since the '90s, Banerjee's works have evolved around oils, the subject, as also of his celebrated peer, Bikash Bhattacharjee, being, yet again, women.

"Like all artists, I try to give permanence to a feeling, a mood; I live for what I think is beautiful," Banerjee says of his art. Certainly, the book captures that evocatively. Works by the artist, displayed at the art gallery in Kolkata, are now on show at New Delhi's Dhoomimal Art Centre till the 22nd.