During my visit to the Kolkata Centre for Creativity (KCC), a day after the opening of K.G. Subramanyan’s retrospective at Emami Art, I hear several stories about the renowned artist. Mani da, as he was affectionately known, “had a sweet tooth”, a former student of Shantiniketan tells me. “A colleague used to bake cakes for him every weekend in Shantiniketan. Even though I only met him when he was already ‘KG’ [shortened from Kalpathi Ganpathi], and he would come for lectures surrounded by people, he was always nice to me. He even did a quick sketch in my notebook once.”
Subramanyan, it seems, gave away his art to everyone — many of those who studied in Shantiniketan or visited the institution had received works from him. “Even then, there was enough artwork for so many retrospectives [like this one to mark the Kerala-born Tamil Brahmin’s centenary birth anniversary],” she adds. Another person tells me that the late artist, who passed away in 2016, had a caustic sense of humour.
K.G. Subramanyan preparing for the Fine Arts Fair (1967). Photograph by Jyoti Bhatt | Photo Credit: Courtesy Asia Art Archive
KG’s daughter Uma Padmanabhan next to a photograph clicked by Jyoti Bhatt of her and her father | Photo Credit: Courtesy Asia Art Archive
“I came to know him when I joined Kala Bhavana as a Masters student,” says Ushmita Sahu, director and head curator of Emami Art. “And over the years, we [her husband Prasanta is an artist and teaches in Kala Bhavana] became very close to him and his daughter Uma. When he would visit our home in Santiniketan, I would cook for him and he would share his vast knowledge with us.”
I find mentions of KG everywhere I turn in Kolkata. Serendipitously, there are references to him even in Holding Time Captive, the biography of theatre persona and art collector Ebrahim Alkazi that I’m engrossed in. This comes as a surprise because I associate Alkazi with the Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group and KG had his roots firmly in Shantiniketan and folk arts such as patachitra. They seem miles away from each other, but a Kolkata friend tells me that Alkazi helped KG travel to England as a Fellow at the prestigious St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, in the 1980s.
Curator Nancy Adajania during the preview of One Hundred Years and Counting: Re-Scripting KG Subramanyan | Photo Credit: Courtesy Seagull Foundation
Painter, activist, teacher
His art falls under a category that another fellow attendee, the revered Shantiniketan teacher R. Siva Kumar, calls Contextual Modernism. It advocated for the incorporation of local elements in art along with humanism and cross-culturalism, rather than European modernist styles. KG, a freedom fighter before he came to the Shantiniketan School of Art, followed in the footsteps of his teachers Ramkinker Baij and Nandalal Bose, and of course, the founders of the Bengal School and Shantiniketan respectively, Abanindranath Tagore and Rabindranath Tagore.
KG experimented with a range of materials as well as themes. Over the 70-odd years of his career, he was a painter, printmaker, author, toy maker, muralist, and relief sculptor who made significant contributions to institutions such as the All-India Handloom Board and the World Craft Council Board. He remained an activist, institution builder, and teacher till the end of his life both at Shantiniketan and Maharaja Sayajirao University (MSU) in Baroda.
Ballpoint pen, watercolour, gouache on postcards | Photo Credit: Vivian Sarky | Seagull Foundation
Toys made for Fine Arts Fairs, between 1962-63 and 1979. Photographs by Indrapramit Roy | Photo Credit: Vivian Sarky | Seagull Foundation
Rhino - bamboo, wood & leather | Photo Credit: Vivian Sarky | Seagull Foundation
This exhibition, One Hundred Years and Counting: Re-Scripting KG Subramanyan — which has over 200 works curated by cultural theorist Nancy Adajania from the collections of Seagull Foundation, MSU, and Asia Art Archive — looks at KG’s large repository of work. As Adajania explains, this includes his “early paintings from the 1950s; iconic reverse paintings on acrylic, which look like polychrome stained glass windows; marker pen works on paper; postcard-size drawings from his visit to China; and toys made for the fine arts fairs”. It also has never-seen archival material such as handcrafted mock-ups of his children’s books and preparatory sketches for murals.
The maquettes of his final mural, the massive 2.7 x 10.9-metre, black-and-white acrylic on canvas called The War of the Relics (2013), which uses motifs from myth and contemporary culture to show the medieval mindset of human confrontation, are stunning. KG was 88 and had just had major surgery when he decided to make the huge piece.
Scale shot of watercolour and oil reverse paintings on acrylic sheets | Photo Credit: Vivian Sarky | Seagull Foundation
The Reaper (1998) | Photo Credit: Vivian Sarky | Seagull Foundation
Telling it as it is
But KG’s activist mindset didn’t just extend to the grandiose. My favourite part of the exhibition is a children’s book that is a thinly veiled satire on the political drama of 1970s India called The Tale of the Talking Face. The story of a princess whose autocratic rule brought nothing but suffering to her people, despite her ambition of progress for her country, is a universal record of the ever-deepening crisis of democracy and the threat of totalitarianism.
Vinyl cutouts from The Tale of The Talking Face | Photo Credit: Vivian Sarky | Seagull Foundation
One wall is devoted to his children’s book mock-ups. The motif of Robby, a character who wears many faces, is a recurring one across the exhibition — with stickers pasted on the floor and walls. The theme of many faces also carries on in the idea of the bahrupiya or impersonator, which is a major theme in the paintings displayed — as well as in a clip from a Ritwik Ghatak film about a bahrupiya playing Kali, which Adajania shows as an adjacency of KG’s affinity with people playing many roles. One painting that stood out for me: a small green one of a many-armed and -legged goddess with a tree growing from her head and a blue-faced bahrupiya in front of her.
Vinyl mock-up of Robby from the book How Hanu Became Hanuman | Photo Credit: Vivian Sarky | Seagull Foundation, Maharaja Sayajirao University
“One Hundred Years and Counting shows that KG is still relevant, and it is for us to see how we can keep engaging with him,” says Adjania, pointing out his sand-cast cement mural installation from 1969 — part of Gandhi Darshan’s ‘India of My Dreams’ pavilion in Delhi — which talks about the Gandhian notion of the idealised village. Through it, she explores his ideological affinity with Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Rabindranath Tagore, who have “all been neutralised as icons, emptied of content or vilified”.
Preparatory sketches for the Gandhi Darshan mural (1969). Ballpoint pen on paper | Photo Credit: Vivian Sarky | Seagull Foundation
As she puts it, it is interesting to see a resurgence of the legacy of “arguably the most popular and relevant artist and teacher of independent India” through exhibitions across Mumbai, Vadodra and Kolkata, when the legacy of his peers is being extinguished.
Till June 21 at Emami Art, Kolkata Centre of Creativity.
The writer is an expert on South Asian art and culture.
Disclaimer: The copyright of this article belongs to the original author. Reposting this article is solely for the purpose of information dissemination and does not constitute any investment advice. If there is any infringement, please contact us immediately. We will make corrections or deletions as necessary. Thank you.
