Between Sight and Insight

Spanning various periods of the artist's oeuvre, an exhibition has recently been held in Delhi's Vadhera Art Gallery to acknowledge Benode Behari Mukherjee through multiple lenses including glimpses of him through his own eyes, presented through a series of self-portraits; a selection of intimate sketches of flora that reveal the significance of minute details in his vocabulary, speaking not only of how he saw the world due to his limited eyesight but focusing on the significance of linear form in his understanding of space; his landscapes, preparatory drawings and paintings, which lend themselves to analysis by anyone wanting to engage with Mukherjee's unique understanding of space.

Curator R. Siva Kumar shares how eminent an artist Mukherjee is. He says,"Let me tell you why Benode Behari is important. He is not only an important artist, one of the best among the best. That being agreed, I hope you will also accept that (even 38 years after his death) he is not as well recognised as many others who you consider important and that in itself is a good reason for having a major exhibition of his work."

Benode Behari Mukherjee is one of the first students of Kala Bhavan at Shantiniketan who transformed the institution into a seminal centre in India. He was involved in exploring the rationale underlying different pictorial conventions finally bringing together the skeins of folk and Indian classical styles, Far Eastern calligraphic painting and early Renaissance conventions with post-cubist idiom.

Talking about the style that made the artist what he has been Kumar voices, "He made a clean break from the tradition of mythological and historical paintings that stretched from Ravi Varma to the Bengal School artists of his time. He replaced it with an art that brought the the subjectivity of the artist to the centre of his practice and brought it to bear on the way he looked at the world. In this he was a pioneer in Indian art. He also drew upon several Eastern and European antecedents to develop an independent style that is internally coherent."

Blindness did not deter Benodebehari from remaining creative. From 1958 to 1972 besides teaching Art History at Kala Bhavana he did paper cuts, drawings, prints and even a mural with some assistance from others. Already a writer on art since the 1940s he now wrote some remarkable texts including a history of the beginnings of modern art education in India, two autobiographical pieces and a few longer meditations on art, literature and their values in different cultures.  

This fame has been considered to be a multi-talented one as well. Agreeing to which the art enthusiast and curator of this exhibition shares, "He is, without any doubt, the first major muralist, if not the most important modern muralist India has had. His mural The Life of the Medieval Saints has been described as the single most important work of the twentieth century. The British critic Timothy Hyman, discussing Benodebehari's method of painting this mural, in his recent book on Figurative Painting in the Twentieth Century wrote: "No one in the modern West has dared to paint on the wall so directly as this, nor achieved this fusion of a monumental public scale with such lyrical and tender voice.' Such an artist, I hope you will agree, needs to be better known."

Benode Behari Mukherjee

The 70s brought Benode recognition as an artist and writer. He won several honours including the Padma Vibushan, the second highest civilian award, and Rabindra Puraskar a coveted award for literature. He left Santiniketan for good in December 1972, and moved first to Dehra Dun, and then to Delhi where his sculptor daughter Mrinalini Mukherjee had settled. He died in Delhi on 19th November 1980. By then this intensely thoughtful and self-effacingly reticent artist was recognized not only as a symbol of indomitable spirit but also as a modern artist to be reckoned with. More importantly a new generation of Indian artist who were revisiting the tradition of figuration and narration in Indian art and its affinities in world art recognized him as a worthy predecessor. And with it he was born once again posthumously. As one comes across the glimpses of the artist's work, one is bound to believe in the inner power that rests within everybody. Mukherjee has set an example of what one can and possibly cannot do even with physical boundaries.