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Few people were as mythologised in their lifetime as Ganesh Pyne, perhaps because he was so reticent that his rare public outings, and his rarer interviews, resulted in his pithy dialogues becoming the talismans from which Pyne lovers hoped to get a glimpse into his "tortured" self. His reclusiveness was respected - with the exception of the more aggressive among a new and growing breed of gallerists - but rarely questioned. Other Kolkata artists had seen death and decomposition from close up - famously, Rabin Mondal, Jogen Chowdhury, even Bikash Bhattacharjee - and it was part of their art practice, but nowhere else did that malfeasance create similar theatres of tragedy as in the case of Pyne. Mondal and Chowdhury, like Pyne, recreated the power-mongering, rapine world of apes, and Bhattacharje explored the territory of fear and loss. But in completely obliterating Pyne's tribute to memory and nostalgia in his poignant portraits and studies, critics created an alternate persona for him that they spun around a lifelong affair with despair.
As a consequence, his often lyrical portraits of people, of particularly women rendered in an aesthetic trope, were almost excluded from his inventory, or became subjects of metaphor-hunting. It was almost as if no other identity was allowed to the artist who himself disdained the cult of celebrity preferring, if not anonymity, at least seclusion. As an artist, he enjoyed more than most the process of painting over the finished painting. If at all he spoke, it was mostly about his need to continue painting. He didn't, but he might have said, "I paint, therefore I am."
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Born in 1937 in Calcutta, the lampposts of his career and life are well enough known. In 1946, he was horrified when faced with a handcart piled with bodies of dead riot victims oozing blood and entrails - that first canker that entered his soul and embittered his life. It was a shock he would never recover from, the dismembered limbs of violence in Calcutta becoming a simile for his calling.
A student of the Government College of Art and Craft, he would go on to become one of the greatest practitioners of the Bengal School, most especially in his use of tempera which he used with an almost incandescent, translucent effect. The Society of Contemporary Artists that he joined in 1963 was experimenting with a modernism that, like the celebrated Progressives of Bombay, was at that time engaged in seeking its validity from the West.
Pyne, till this point, was a quiet but active addabaaz, spending his time in the smoky cafes of Calcutta, immersing himself in stimulating conversations about everything from communism to nationalism, a passionate devotee of Pablo Picasso, and an artist who, though he "lacked the money to buy paint", covered entire sheets with pen and ink drawings.
Growing Naxalism saw him retreat within himself, but it was the '80s when he withdrew completely from social interactions. That this coincided with his rising fame was no happenstance. Pyne's fortune was on the rise from a growing appreciation for his art. Whether M F Husain's endorsement of him as one of India's more important painters added to that legend can only be speculated, but a familiarity with his name and, already, a scarcity around his works, was responsible for collectors seeking out his paintings.
It is works from this period that are unequivocally dark. The abyss of despair that he was experiencing was captured in negative tones of blue and black, while reds and oranges flagged off signals of threat and danger. Corruption and moral decay, an obsession with death - not in the sense of transience or temporality, but as a final act of vindication - of skeletal, hybrid beasts rank with symbolism, skulls, angels of death and ghostly apparitions, abounded. If earlier he had painted with a sense of anger, it was now replaced with alienation, loneliness and helplessness, in part because of a breach that had developed between him and the art community in which he saw the roots of corruption and senseless peer rivalry.
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For Pyne, painting was an act not removed from responsibility, or religion, terms he might have rejected outright. "My art is my life," he said on occasion, but it was a romanticised ideal in which the blight of money, value, profit and secondary sales had little role to play. He might have been happier to see his works sell for less rather than more, and yet, the growing fables around him made that impossible. Even small works were lapped up. His first major solo in New Delhi in 1995 was a sellout. Exhibitions in Europe drew parallels with Abanindranath Tagore, whose wash style remained an influence throughout his career, but what enchanted art-lovers was his ability to depict the horrifying in a manner that was palatable but with an intellectual twist. You could share a morning cup of coffee with a framed Pyne for company without wincing.
Pyne did try to shrug off the patina of melancholia in the '90s but somewhat indifferently, a result of spousal care, but a fascination for black holes and the mysteries of space replaced, howsoever briefly, the pain and revulsion of his familiar subjects. The fidelities of the market had meanwhile kept pace with him, but Pyne remained unmoved - perhaps even offended - as prices in the secondary market of auctions rose steeply, whether through complicity, or because he remained a favoured collectible.
The brief flirtation aside, he relapsed into a deeper abyss, farther removed from the economic celebration of art that he considered a bubble, almost as though he feared the taint of prosperity. What he never gave up was his resolution to remain "unwaveringly true to art" which resolution led to his imposed isolation. When a few score colleagues came to bid him goodbye as he gave up his ghost, it was an acknowledgement of his importance and their affection for an artist who defied convention. Would Pyne have been comforted by their presence? One can't help thinking he had ducked that question by escaping already into a void of his choosing.
