FROM UNDER THE SHADOW
Artist Kartick Pyne never enjoyed the fame his cousin Ganesh did. A Kolkata gallery is changing that
Pyne’s work has been described as “primitivistic”, showcasing childlike qualities and his training
INartist Samit Das’s studio, there hangs the picture of a deer, an 8x10 watercolour on rice paper. Das says he looks at it every day, and every day it makes him look for something new. Only two of the deer’s limbs are visible. His antlers are enormous, spanning like wings. The belly of the deer is strange, almost like an archaeological site, its eyeball, magnified. “To me, it stands for the artist’s enduring search for an ultimate language. It has been my companion for nearly a decade.”
This marriage of the known and unknown and of realism with the imaginary are all traits Kartick Chandra Pyne is known for. Born in 1931, Pyne is the older cousin of the illustrious Ganesh, one of India’s foremost modernist painters. Despite his prolific career, though, Pyne’s contribution to Indian art has, for the most part, been ignored. Even in Kolkata, his home, not many have heard of him. By hosting a survey show— The (in)Visible and The (un)
Revealed: Inside the Secret Worlds of Kartick Chandra Pyne—Emami Art, a Kolkata gallery (on till June 12), is now giving him the credit he is due.
“In Bengal, the demand was for works that demonstrated social concern and Pyne’s work could not be bracketed thus,” says critic Pranab Ranjan Ray. Bengali artists who went on to become household names—
Bikash Bhattacharya, Somnath Hore, Ganesh Pyne and Ganesh Haloi—all fused their work with socio-political commentary, but the elder Pyne stayed aloof. Even his contemporaries only came to know him much later. Jogen Chowdhury, for example, says he discovered Pyne’s work in the 1970s. His art, he says, struck him as “spontaneous, original”, an art that “described indigenous objects in a surrealistic manner”. Pyne’s work has also been described as “primitivistic”, showcasing childlike qualities and his academic training.
It was not that all recognition passed Pyne by.
He was awarded the 1973-74 Maha Koshal Kala Parisad Prize in Raipur. But in the 1980s and ’90s, he seemed to have disappeared from the zeitgeist altogether. He next surfaced only in 2005, when his ‘Bird in Cage’ made headlines at a Sotheby’s auction. Later, the West Bengal government awarded him the Shilpi Mahasamman in 2014. By the time he passed away in 2017, Pyne had a small but committed following in both India and abroad.
Pranabranjan Ray is of the opinion that one aspect of Pyne’s work has largely been overlooked—of bliss and play for its own sake. “Play, not to win but for joy,” he says. This is comparable, he adds, to the ancient Indian theory of leela (play). He goes on to quote from the Upanishads: “Out of Ananda (bliss) these beings are born, in Ananda they are sustained, and to Ananda, they go and merge again.” ■
—Malini Banerjee