12 March 2013, 04:43 PM IST
Ganesh Pyne was known for penetrating vision. The art world has lost one of its great luminaries. In Kolkata his passing away will be a milestone in the language of contemporary figuration. But at one time Ganesh Pyne was India's most expensive modernist in terms of the square inch.
Ganesh Pyne was known for his small tempera paintings, rich in imagery and symbols. The gallery that touted Ganesh Pyne all along was CIMA in Kolkata and it is said that his image was built up by the Telegraph family. However, Ganesh Pyne was responsible for the metaphoric moorings of the Bengal School and therein lie the emergence of many a Pyne clone in Indian art history.
Ganesh Pyne was the first artist whom the young Paresh Maity met more than 2 decades ago in Kolkata. Paresh in an exclusive to TOI says: "Ganesh Pyne's death is a great loss for the art world. This is not a time to leave us. But these things are not in our hands."
Jayasri Burman says: "Ganesh Pyne lived his life with his own truth and his work was a class apart. The art world loses a giant."
As a child, Ganesh Pyne lived in an old mansion in Calcutta. His grandmother would tell him stories igniting an imagination that would later inspire him to paint masterful pieces of mysticism and fantasy.
From these childhood experiences and stories, Pyne created visual narratives of monkeys as princes, talking grasshoppers, and boy magicians. The monkey named Bir Bahadur, which means 'master of all things' in Bengali, shown in courtier's robes but loosely harnessed by a rope, began life as Emperor Akbar's pet monkey. His wide grin and eager eyes suggests his bondage is due to mischievous behavior. It is only through the result of Pyne's technique of building up paint in washes, glazing them so that each successive layer allows the one beneath to breathe through it, that one can imagine such a world.
In the next work, Pyne recalls being spellbound by the beauty of a small temple that stood in front of his ancestral home in Kaviraj Row. The destruction of the icon may have inspired this work. The entrance way of the shrine affords a view of a somber space allowing the viewer to imagine the next narrative. Pyne creates a visual world where imagination is encouraged.
The TOI in Delhi had an array of Pyne paintings in its collection all collected by Nandita Jain. Ganesh Pyne's paintings always revealed a sinister, twilight world that offered a few certainties, where nothing was ever defined in unequivocally black and white terms. Indeed to look at a Pyne painting was to look at a world of moral ambivalence. In his last show Mahabharata which was considered epic and narrative driven, it seemed as if death smirked even as it rose in its triumphant victory over the crass carcass of life.
Pyne was a great storyteller. In fact he was held in thrall by the fascinating convoluted tales he had heard from his grandmother about the Mahabharata. The epic narrative describes in vivid and graphic terms a civilisation on the brink of destruction as the Pandavas and Kauravas clashed in Kurukshetra.
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So intrigued and moved was Pyne by this sweeping vision of the flawed nature of man that from time to time he has gone back to Mahabharata, portraying various characters in his work. Pyne did not create beautiful works-his works were steeped in solitude and thought and scholarship.
Pyne read two versions of the Mahabharata before he created his magnum opus at CIMA. One of them was Rajshekhar Basu's excellent condensed version of the epic, and the other was the less familiar translation commissioned by the Burdwan royal family. He was also particularly impressed by a translation of S.L. Bhyrappa's Kannada novel Parva, which, he said, "describes in stream of consciousness form the horrifying reality of war."
But Pyne was known for his insight, his penetrating vision, the rich hues that glimmered through the penumbra that pervaded his paintings, and his lapidary style.
Ganesh Pyne was a recluse who shunned the media, avoided the opening of his own exhibitions and withheld his paintings from international auction houses like Sotheby's and Christie's. He was also impossibly arrogant.
Pyne painted dream worlds, a world that "is only half articulate and leaves the rest to a strange eloquent silence." Using images from his childhood, religious iconography and the stories of the Bengali epics, he created an oeuvre that was deeply private, resonant with myth and full of complexity.
(Pictures courtesy: Christie's)
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