The French artist Henri Matisse, known in the West for his use of colour and his fluid, original draughtsmanship, and Benode Behari Mukherjee, an early figure in Indian modern art and a key figure of the Santiniketan school, known for an expressionist view of nature drawn from Far Eastern styles, arrived at a striking resemblance in their later years — in personal circumstance, and in the work each made from it.
Towards the end of his life, Matisse became wheelchair-bound due to a physical illness and lost the ability to work on canvas. It led him to leave the canvas and take up a new technique — white paper, gouache paint and scissors. He painted the white paper with vibrant gouache colours and cut different shapes from it. These papercuts developed into a series of mixed media works quite different from traditional painting. Matisse would cut out designs of his choice from coloured paper, much as a child would, and his assistants would arrange the designs on the studio walls to his direction. As if a child at play, driven by an urge to speak, he brought his imagination into the external world. A childlike Matisse reveals himself through these playful papercuts.
Henri Matisse, The Horse, the Rider, and the Clown 1943-4
Benode Behari Mukherjee, Conversation 1960
Benode Behari Mukherjee was born with a severe eye problem. Despite being myopic in one eye and blind in the other, he continued to paint and make murals until he lost his eyesight completely following an unsuccessful cataract operation in 1956. Benode was heartbroken and fell into depression. Pushpa, the wife of the artist Dinkar Kaushik, encouraged Benode Behari to create paper-cuttings and assisted him in composing the artworks. Collages were born of this unusual collaboration between the two. Later, Benode Behari presented these works to Pushpa.
Both artists had become physically disabled in their later years, which had an enormous impact on their creative work. Looking at these papercuts, one is reminded of children — as if memories from childhood have emerged as vivid images, or as if the artists have become children again. There is no display of skilled brushwork, no trace of rigorously trained technique, only an impression of creative joy and artistic sensibility. The works of both artists are a conjunction of drawing and sculpting in colour, using the edge of the paper to represent both the contour and volume of forms.
Benode Bihari Mukherjee, Lady with fruit, 1957
Benode Behari Mukherjee, inspired by the open-air classrooms of Santiniketan, identified strongly with the spiritual essence in the paintings of the Far East, in contrast to the mechanical Western style, and saw nature as his true subject. Like many of his contemporaries, he engaged with Pan-Asianism and studied the scroll format to understand its techniques for controlling perspective, objects and space.
Trained in the cosmopolitan environment of Santiniketan, he was familiar with contemporary European art movements, and knew of Matisse's cut-out paper works, which Matisse made from 1948 onwards. He used vibrant coloured paper and newspaper, cutting, folding and shaping them with his tactile sense into playful, rhythmic forms. The images formed were figurative yet abstract, the forms pared down to their basics. Immersed in darkness, his creativity found expression, paradoxically, in a burst of colour. Benode Behari had once written, on the verge of despair: "... where there is light there is colour." Through the work itself, he proved otherwise. He made his blindness a tool — a portal to a new dimension of visual perception, a new feeling, a new experience, a new state of being.
Benode Behari detached himself from the Swadeshi and mythological themes of the Bengal School in Calcutta and pursued his interest in nature and Far Eastern aesthetics, arriving at an expressionist strand of modern Indian art. When criticised by a friend for his position on the independence movement, he explained his detachment by stating,
"My objectives have always been around an artist's ultimate's -- have sought to know myself, and in the process unfold it to others, never forgetting that I am just one amongst the many."
He was not a self-proclaimed expressionist, but his projection of his feelings and perceptions of the world placed him in the history of Indian art as one of its most eminent modern expressionists. In Stella Kramrisch's words, his 'impersonal pathos' was evident in his paintings. Traces of his expressionist tendencies and his relationship with art appear in his own words:
"Art grows out of the emotional impulse's diverse sensations of shape and gesture generate in us, this bright and colourful world. Art expression moves from emotional impulse to mood, from mood to aesthetic beauty. An artist's creation cannot attain its full stature until it brings into barking his experience of reality and his mind's emotional bias."