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ARTS: PARITOSH SEN
The Master Returns
After a gap of nearly a decade the unassuming painter
of the human condition is back with a retrospective exhibition spanning
60 years
By S. Kalidas
He is definitely
not as flamboyant a performer as M.F. Husain. Nor as elusive a cult figure
as Ganesh Pyne. But even at 83, the ebullient and sprightly Paritosh Sen
is easily the most polished-if understated-master of modern art we have
today. His shy smile, the mischievous twinkle in his eye and the tall,
slim frame make for a handsome man. And despite his decades of experience
and a life lived to the full, there is an incredible lightness in his
being: Sanaskritists would describe him as sahaja-almost literally in
present-day journalese he is a natural.
Over the next two weeks, Delhi's Lalit Kala
Akademi gallery will host a retrospective of Sen's works covering the
trajectory of the painter's changing muse in a variety of mediums from
the early water colours and gouache in the manner of the Bengal School
to his later oils and acrylic in the expressionist/cubist mode. The exhibition
has already been shown in Mumbai and Kolkata and will go from the capital
to Chennai to culminate in the long journey's end at the very place from
where it all began in the mid-1930s.
For it was from Chennai (then Madras) that Sen's
foray into the realm of line, form and colour began. It was to Madras
that a 17-year-old Sen fled from his native village Beltoli near Dhaka
in what was then East Bengal. Why Madras? "I was a deep admirer of
the sculptor-painter D.P. Roy Chowdhury who at that time was the principal
of the Madras Art College," says Sen. But probably what also prompted
the long and arduous trek across the subcontinent was a need to get away
from home ("Those days, to be a painter in middle-class families
was equated with being a wastrel") to taste life and adventure in
alien climes-something that never failed to inspire him.
After finishing college in 1939, Sen taught
art at Daly College, Indore, for 10 years. "I first met Husain and
N.S. Bendre there. Husain was studying under Devlalikar and although Bendre
lived in Mumbai his home town was Indore." As early as 1943 Sen founded
the Calcutta Group which preceded the establishment of the Mumbai-based
Progressive Artists Group by three years. "Mulk Raj Anand invited
us to Mumbai and later we also had a joint exhibition with the Progressives,"
recalls Sen, mildly setting the record right after a recent book sought
to establish the Mumbai boys as the original pioneers of the modernist
movement in India. "Santiniketan and more specifically Rabindranath
Tagore brought modernism to India first," he asserts, recalling that
Tagore's brooding water colours in the expressionist style were exhibited
in Paris in the late 1920s.
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