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THE
ARTS: MANJIT BAWA
Animal
Passion
The artist's
metro-hopping exhibition is on. But it seems like Bawa is stuck with the
flamboyant animal forms that he created three decades ago
By Anshul
Avijit
The
opening at Maurya Sheraton's subterranean exhibition room was crowded
and customarily wild. All, mostly artizens of the capital and their ever
expanding clique of cultural cognoscenti, balanced a glass of hotel-sponsored
Riviera and a jacket-cover catalogue, and muscled their way to the 6 ft
1 inch star of the evening, Manjit Bawa, with the hope of an autograph.
Bawa's opening-night
enthusiasm showed in his gummy pen strokes: for each he did variable profiles
of saber-toothed sadhus with creases on their thyroidish throats or of
wiry-hair yuppies with globular noses. A bit like the stuff on the walls.
Then he would sign his name, all letters discernable, with even greater
verve, almost as if he'd saved the best for last. "I practised making
about 200 such drawings when I was in Calcutta," said the 60-year-old
artist, his grin appearing faint through his impregnably hirsute face.
"Now it barely takes me a few seconds." Including the signature.
Later after
everyone had left, high on art and additives, Bawa and his close circle
of devotees fashionably drove down to Karim's at Jama Masjid for biryani
and brain curry. The only thing that still hung around in the heated air
of the exhibition room, apart from the limp smell of smoke and alcohol,
were the most oft repeated adjectives of the evening: "very impressive"
and "marvellous". Couldn't have been in praise of the wine.
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CONTROVERSY
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Canvas
of Contention
Usually
you know you're looking at a patented Manjit Bawa when you notice
the facile frames, the swollen sinews and the usual background of
flat Basholi colours. Now you're not so sure. Last year when Bawa's
long-time studio assistant Mohinder Soni, after a spat with his
mentor, resentfully came out into the open with lots of studio secrets,
none of the celebrated artist's works could be entirely credited
to him. Soni's contention: that it was he, not Bawa, who for the
past eight years or so was doing most of the drawings, filling in
the colours, sometimes even conceptualising entire series of paintings.
"All the miniatures, and many of the other works were done
entirely by me," claims Soni.
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"All
the miniatures were done entirely by me."
Mohinder
Soni
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Now,
after more than a year of Bawa lying low, there's a new twist to
the tale. When one of Bawa's so-called miniatures came up for sale
at a Christie's auction in New York in September, Bawa fired a letter
to the auctioneers asking them to withdraw what he called a "a
forged" painting. "Anyway I never sign on the front of
any painting except when it is a drawing," says Bawa. Christie's
agreed saying if a living artist asserted that one of his works
was a fake, then they had no choice but to comply. But Delhi's Arushi
Gallery, Soni's new palette patrons and the suppliers of the apocryphal
work, replied that if that particular miniature had not been done
by Bawa then neither were the others floating in the market (implying
that they had been done by Soni).
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| The
signed work that caused the furore |
Bawa
himself never denies he had Soni help him paint many of his paintings.
"Of course, I'd be lying if I told you all the background colours
even the tracing and blueprints were done by him. But it was I who
did all the redrawing. It's absolute rubbish that Soni had completed
paintings under my supervision or that he had been conceptualising
my work." Bawa says that he threw out Soni as soon as he discovered
his assistant had been clandestinely copying his works. "Now
there are many copies of my work all over the world," adds
the disgruntled artist. That seems to have certainly affected Bawa's
once-burgeoning market.
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The works
in Bawa's 60th solo show, travelling later to Calcutta, Bangalore, Chennai
(for the first time) and an abbreviated version in Mumbai, are a jumble
of mostly conte drawings, some sketchbook studies, 10 oil-on-canvas portraits
and a large painting of a mutant Kali beside Bhairav's pantherish watchdog
with over-prominent neck nerves. The catalogue (and the show), sponsored
jointly by Mumbai's Sakshi Gallery and art outfit Sama'a, only features
the sketches, so essentially this is a drawing comeback, Bawa's daily
addiction ever since he passed out from the School of Art, Delhi Polytechnic
in 1963 (now formally exalted as the degree-giving College of Art). It
was through the drawings that Bawa developed his celebrated and singularly
India-inspired idiom-the animal forms, a balmy ballet of sinews and seamless
limbs and the human forms, an alignment of superimposed pipettes. The
artist remembers those formative years: "It was like a riyaz. In
1963, before leaving for England I spent about three months walking in
the hills of Himachal, drawing people, animals. I walked about 40-50 km
a day and I was particularly fascinated by the Shiva forms and the huge
block of colour that is Hanuman." He also covered the whole of Jhabua,
Bhil country, by cycle, filling in more sketchbooks.
Bawa's representational
vocabulary kept bettering during his eight-year stint in London where
he kept afloat by doing freelance posters for British Airways and gambling
(that's no misprint) at Playback Club. "I mastered the art of playing
blackjack and I made 44 pounds a day ... a day!" said Bawa, the next
day at his show. "And that was something in those days. I don't really
reveal this too much because the moment you mention gambling people misunderstand."
Blackjack helped Bawa to take some 13 road trips to Turkey in those eight
years, apart from trips to every European country. The result: more worn-out
sketchbooks. (In fact in the past year itself he travelled to more than
13 countries, returning from Iran just two days before the show. He was
seen warding off irate oldtimers who couldn't be invited to the opening
with this excuse.) And one other London development that people don't
know much about: he began a lot of silk-screen work that later became
the basis of his plushy, monochromatic backgrounds.
Appears
Bawa got stuck. The flamboyant animal forms that he had developed about
30 years ago are still there in his drawings as are the tubular excesses
of the human contours ... what visitors were wowing over at the opening.
Almost as if Bawa painted a handful of great images in his life and the
rest were nothing but subtly modified regurgitations. Newer paraphrases
of older hits. Okay, change doesn't have to be vigorous or dynamic but
would the slant of the head or the change of colour necessarily mean artistic
evolvement? "Well these are the images that keep coming back to me
when I paint," says Bawa, "and they have been changing, even
if very gradually."
Look at
the drawings. The vampish goats are still there, showing off their bulbous
butts, so are the moody cows surrounded by Ranjha (Bawa is known for his
Sufi inputs) and the mock-fierce lions with tendons varying from extra-large
to medium. But the human figures show some pictorial discomfiture, sometimes
even deterioration ... becoming increasingly representational and non-stylised.
Or stylised only in parts so that the sections appear anomalous. This
is particularly true of the paintings and drawings of acrobats and contortionists
that Bawa first began in the 1980s (he got street artists from a Rajasthani
slum called Kathputli in Delhi to pose for him) and continues. But the
discrepancy is easily explained: "I love animals more than humans
... they're much more flexible. Look at the bull, it can easily reach
its behind. Can humans do the same?"
Obviously
they've tried and they can't. Which is why a massive 8 ft by 5 ft drawing
of bulls in various poses of back-turning flexibility (with a less-agile
gopi, actually Bawa himself, in the middle) costs as much as Rs 5 lakh.
The price is definitely "impressive".
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