Ganesh Pyne (1937–2013) was reclusive by nature and valued his privacy; Calcutta’s continuing interest in him owes something to that reticence, and something to the fact that he is one of the most significant Indian painters of the century. Where earlier generations of artists had worked through the tension between tradition and modernity, Pyne’s paintings resolved it, integrating Eastern and Western approaches. He was a direct inheritor of the values of the Bengal School.
His work carries the same fine, precise line, the same delicate modelling of figures, the same palette and the same drawing on literary and mythological sources as the Bengal School, particularly in the paintings he made in the late 1950s and early 1960s. But Pyne was also a modernist, in the distortion of his figures, the flat treatment of pictorial space and the sensibility he brought to his paintings. One evening, on his way to join other children playing on the Medical College grounds, the young Ganesh was stopped by a handcart being wheeled in through the college gates, piled with dead bodies. On top lay the body of a woman, evidently from an upper-class background, her silver hair loose, naked but for a narrow gold chain, with a gash of dried blood on her throat. This was Pyne’s first encounter with the indignity of death; horrified, he turned back to his grandmother instead of joining the other children, and tried afterwards to push the sight from his mind.
Nearly thirty years later, when he painted The Assassin, that impression seems to resurface. The scene he had witnessed as a child was a consequence of the 1946 riots, among the worst communal violence Calcutta saw that century, in a city that had been under mounting tension since the start of the decade. Pyne, the second of five children, grew up with his grandmother Nandarani at the centre of the family. He admired his elder brother Kartik, who was outgoing and confident where Ganesh was quiet and shy. In 1952, aged 15, he saw a major exhibition of Abanindranath Tagore’s work at the Indian Museum, which he later described as a revelation; on the strength of his own drawing, he was allowed to join the second year of Art College directly. Early in his time there he decided to chart his own course rather than follow any school or movement. Chintamoni Kar was principal when he joined. Among his teachers, Manik Lal Bandyopadhyay painted delicate nature and figure studies on silk in the Bengal School style, and Satyen Ghoshal and Gopal Ghose also taught there; Gopal Ghose, a landscape painter once associated with the Calcutta Group, did not teach directly but painted in a corner of the class, and watching him work was itself a lesson. The teacher who influenced him most was Deb Kumar Roy Chowdhury. Pyne was drawn to dramatic lighting at college, and later credited Rembrandt’s use of shadow and what he called an ‘indescribable golden umber’.
After discovering Abanindranath and Rembrandt, one more moment shaped him: he heard Paritosh Sen, newly returned from Paris, give a talk with slides on contemporary European art. The discussion of Paul Klee, and Klee’s metaphysical temperament, left a lasting impression on him. It had become fashionable for Indian artists to go to Paris or London and embrace Western modernism, but Pyne kept to his own path while his contemporaries moved in different directions: Somnath Hore and Chittaprosad Bhattacharya documented the famine; Shanu Lahiri, Paritosh Sen and Prokash Karmakar took a more Cubist and Fauvist approach; Jogen Chowdhury brought new energy to figurative painting; and Lalu Prasad Shaw moved towards abstraction.
Pyne’s tastes were wide-ranging, but he drew heavily on a private mythology built from the folk tales and fairy stories he had heard as a child on his grandmother’s lap. Committed to draughtsmanship and equally at ease in watercolour and gouache, he was best known for his work in tempera, a technique he made his own. Through his career he kept returning to scenes and characters from history, literature, cinema and the epics: faces marked by pain or grief, eyes stricken with fear or vengeance, images that echoed the political upheavals of the Bengal he lived through. An admirer of Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini’s films, he developed a visual language that was quiet and restrained without softening what it showed. His work was shaped by a lifelong, near-total absorption in the act of painting, and by an inner world of darkness and light from which his images emerged.
Vinayak Pasricha.