K.G. SUBRAMANYAN has been accorded his fourth major retrospective in the last two decades (at the National Gallery of Modern Art, till March 16). This is an extraordinary tribute in a country where leading figures of the modern art movement — Benodebehari Mukherjee, J. Swaminathan, F.N. Souza or even Abanindranath Tagore have yet to be given even one such signal honour. This compels some leading questions; questions about Subramanyan's world-view, his contemporaneity, and most specifically, the role he has played in constructing an Indian modernism.
Certainly among all his contemporaries, K.G. confronts and upsets the modernist agenda. He wrote in 1990-91: "I never thought of modernism as a value or manner, only as a new cultural situation." (Art Heritage, No. 10). As his body of work reveals, he steered clear of the grand narrative of new-old nation, and its full bodied villagers that sway to silent rhythms, nor did he claim the exalted state of high modernism. Perhaps his greatest contribution has been to expand and carry the legacy of Santiniketan into an unequivocal language of contemporary concerns. More significantly, he is the only artist of his generation to continually investigate the role of art. To his credit he has often gone against the grain, with admissions of doubt and introspection, free of didacticism.
Art historian R. Siva Kumar, who has created the retrospective combined with an authoritative catalogue, emphasises the syncretic nature of Subramanyan's art. As inheritor of the legacy of Santiniketan, K.G. pushes forward his teacher Benodebehari's engagement with an Indian modernism. However Subramanyan transcends mere art practice — no matter how rigorous its demands — as a philosopher ideologue. Subramanyan often elucidates his position through parables. The Japanese artist/monk Mu Chi, or Socrates are his alter-ego as interlocutors, who drop in for a tea or a chat, and through whom Subramanyan dilates on life, art, in short, the state of the world. With a sardonic charm, he pre-empts critique placing painting and intellectual proposition on simultaneous planes before the reader as it were. Subramanyan, is, for instance, the only artist to have critiqued the role of the art critic. Emerging from the clouds of art history and sociology, the critic, he believes, has graduated to the role of curator, cracking the whip for the artist who must jump from stool to stool, like a performing animal. Instead, he speaks of the magnificence of the transgressions of art, which allow it to exceed a brief and bring it closer to an act of love in which the artist and the respondent are both part.
Born in Mahe, north Kerala, Subramanyan's early memories are of temple sculptures, "the visual magic of the language of Kathakali and the gripping fantasia of the travelling theatre". As a school boy he was fascinated by making assembled objects, devising dioramas. As a college student, D.P. Roy Chowdhury saw his drawings and recommended him to Nandalal Bose in Santiniketan.
The Subramanyan oeuvre, which dates back to his Santiniketan style drawings of palm trees and beyond to over a period of nearly six decades, is huge. On view at the NGMA are over 300 paintings, lithographs, toys, books, sketches, drawings, murals, and the range of materials includes terracotta, glass, paper, wood porcelain and metal cement. These reflect his own view of art and tradition as an integral part of life, a system of "lost" or receding values that lends this show its particular piquancy. Subramanyan has engaged passionately with the process as much as the end product. For instance he speaks of the sketch as "something that happens between the artist and the object. Now closer to the artist, now closer to the object, but still hanging in the tension in between."
The art-craft continuum not withstanding, Subramanyan has brought a distinct intellectual vigour to his art practice. The integration of different sensibilities and aesthetics is critical to his work. By the early 1960's, Subramanyan was already known for his terracotta murals. However, a decisive phase in his work relates to his polyptichs of the 1960s in which fragmented images, only partially revealed, appear to weave in and out of highly structured panels. The possibility of cubistic planes, or minimalist modules now rendered pervious with limbs or free floating objects are seen in works like "Vibhas Ragini" (1965) and "Two Women in a Room" (1968). They presage Subramanyan's well established preoccupation with the qualities of irony, concealment or play in his work. Subsequently, the structure comes to resemble the frame, the window, the mirror, the dramatically placed colour field, the vertical division of trees. From its interstices, appear the figures of his fabular narratives. "Black Boys Fight with Demons" (1986). In this mode, is a masterly ironic evocation of the Krishna narrative.
Confronted with the body of work, Subramanyan appears to follow some dominant strains and emotions — primarily as critic/observer of a society that has betrayed itself. Given the sharp pungent flavour of this body of work, the viewer realises with continual surprise at how, at the age of nearly 80, he stands like the lone tower of Indian art.
So complex is the Subramanyan oeuvre that it would take much more than one article to do it justice. It may be simpler then to pare the discussion down to his treatment of the feminine subject or what he describes, to his alter ego Mu Chi, as "A girl in every goddess, a goddess in every girl". It comes as a surprise to see just how many of the paintings on view are devoted to the Devi Mahishasuramardini, with occasional references to Chhinamsta and Kali. Subramanyan's explanation is typically inconclusive. He speaks of stray inspirations, such as the painted carvings in the temple at Parimattam near Mahe that fascinated him as a child and the dynamic Mahishasuramardini at the Kailashnath temple. But typically, there is another more home spun association. In the early 1960's, Subramanyan lived near a rehabilitation centre in Jangpura village in Delhi. On one occasion, one of the villagers tried to steal a buffalo. A woman jumped into the fray, slapped the thief and then led the buffalo by the horns to safety. In Subramanyan's world of cosmic alliances, it is this sense of the demythified goddess, virile and domesticated, that prevails. In his painting, Mahishasuramardini contorts like an acrobat, limbering up for her violent encounters as it were. Her appearance, cyclical and bizarre, leads the artist to describe her as a Bahurupee — "playful, poetic, polyvalent"; as he describes her in the streets of Calcutta "thronged with pimps, prostitutes, politicians, policemen, cloud-capped intellectuals. Then at the corners, a naked, black goddess who puts her tongue out at you. Or that ubiquitous Durga armed to the teeth, charming and aggressive at the same time". Arms flailing, the sickle wielding goddess appears like a folk heroine of a village people. The myth is desacralised into an image of a goddess, half-virile, half-playful.
Subramanyan's particular treatment of women is in sharp contrast to his virile athletic goddess. It recalls an essay by Octavio Paz on the foundations of Mexico, in which Paz characterises the feminine in two distinct spheres: the sphere of the goddess (in this case the Virgin of Guadaloupe) and the whore. In a culture that tends to exalt the feminine in art, Subramanyan goes against the grain. The typical Subramanyan women is ennui stricken, patently irritated, caught up in a sexual reverie of simply passing in a way that makes you want to suppress a guffaw, (e.g. "Mrs. Dasgupta looks at Santiniketan"). There is a sense of purposelessness, a gratuitous exposure of the body all rendered to militate against the idea of the exalted feminine. Typical are "Reverie of an Army Man's Wife" (1981) with her air of complete vacuity, "Women Sad and Smiling" (1981) or the several configurations of women with monkeys, cats and crows. Subramanyan confines women to interiors — they might appear pressed against the frames of their own domestic sphere. This is very far from Subramanyan's early idealism of his Gandhi-inspired work "India of My Dreams" (1969). If the woman is somewhat tragic and abandoned, the man in Subramanyan is usually vacuous and voyeuristic, while the child is marked and defenceless. In "Ethiopian Nativity" (1987), a woman, or perhaps a goddess, with flailing arms delivers a child, who bears a cross on his back, like a civilisational stigma.
Subramanyan is now more socially reactive than ever before; his recent paintings respond to the cataclysm of Gujarat, to the fragmented burning cities, and divided towns, a testament to our national shame. Through all this, Subramanyan continues to successfully develop a language that he describes as having "linguistic flexibility that can reach back in time as well as go forward. That will impersonalise the personal with an accessible myth or parallel". As a body of work, it stands as a distinct and dynamic legacy in Indian art.