Above: The artist, Manjit Bawa. Below: second and third from the bottom - details from two of his 1984 paintings.
Art
Renowned Artist Manjit Singh Bawa Passes Away
by ANUBHA SAWHNEY JOSHI
As recently as September 2008, Manjit Singh Bawa's untitled work sold for $362,500 at a Christie's auction in New York.
The artist, of course, was oblivious to this and many other sales of his works in the recent past - he was in a coma for three years, brought on by a stroke he suffered in December 2005.
On Monday (December 29, 2008), Bawa passed away in his house in Delhi. He is survived by a son, Ravi, and a daughter, Bhavna.
The 61-year-old painter was born in Dhuri in Punjab and studied at the College of Art in Delhi. Most of his paintings reflect the universal themes of hope, compassion, love, peace and joy.
Says Ina Puri, friend, biographer and the curator of most of Bawa's major shows, "I can't imagine the words 'Manjit' and 'obituary' in the same sentence - he was so full of life. The most vivid things about his work were the colours he used, his iconography, and the way he painted animals. Manjit was a very compassionate man and this compassion came through in his work. His paintings have always been full of peace and hope. I remember curating a show of his to commemorate twenty years of the anti-Sikh pogroms. Though stemmed in violence, each canvas stood out as a message of peace. That, I think, is the quality that makes Manjit's works eternal.''
Senior artist and friend Krishen Khanna remembers Bawa as a wonderful draftsman who put the essentially Indian concept of prana or breath into his work.
"As an artist, he had a sharp and definitive sense of colour coupled with an astute sense of tone and gradation. He could handle yellows like nobody else could,'' says Khanna.
"On the personal front, Manjit had the unique quality of giving enormous respect without losing friendship. He was always ready to help. I remember when I did the mural in the lobby of a popular Delhi hotel, Manjit would drop by every day and get on to a ladder and touch up the parts that needed touching up - just like that.''
Friends recall Bawa as a happy person who often went through life's circumstances with strength and not much else.
"For about thirty years, none of his works sold but that didn't change either the man or his positive attitude. I'd say he was one of India's most energetic painters, next to Husain. Manjit Bawa had a unique aesthetic language and a great knowledge of Indian mythology which he expressed through his work,'' says gallery owner Arun Vadehra.
Bawa's authorised biography, In Black And White, was done and ready to go to press when he suffered a stroke in December 2005.
"All the chapters in the book are named after a colour. When the publishers asked me to update the manuscript, I called the last chapter Grey,'' recalls Puri. While Bawa wrote the foreword to the biography, he never got to see the final version.
Manjit Bawa and the 1984 Anti-Sikh Pogroms
by ANNA M.M. VETTICAD
[Originally published in November 2004, on the 20th anniversary of the Pogroms]
Violence and massacre aren't themes you associate with artist Manjit Singh Bawa's bright, colourful and often unquestioningly flat surfaces.
But twenty years after the massacre of Sikhs in the capital of India and other parts of the country, the artist is ready with five frames. They capture, for the first time, what he says is his "immeasurable pain'' over the anti-Sikh pogroms of 1984, the agony of ‘‘witnessing the murder of his own people,'' the killings in Gujarat, 9/11 and even the Beslan school killings.
They will go on display at an exhibition titled "Mapping the Conscience: 1984-2004'' starting Friday at Delhi's Palette Art Gallery.
"The time was right,'' says the 62-year-old Bawa when asked if the show is being held to coincide with the 20th anniversary. ‘‘I don't believe in cashing in on recent tragedies. When wounds are fresh to ek tinka bhi aag mein phekna galat hai (then it's wrong to throw even one straw into the fire).''
With the safety net of time to fall back on, he says: "There's so much violence in this world. I have to say something. After all, I'm not just an artist, I'm a human being too.''
Bawa's pain has come pouring out of his palette. His images are stark, though not bloody. In one, a man symbolizing the artist himself is attacking a boy on his lap. The child represents Bawa's now thirty-year-old son Ravi. In another painting, the same bearded man is about to kill a little girl who, curator Ina Puri explains, "stands for Manjit's daughter who was not even born in 1984.'' The daughter, Bhavna, is now 18.
"When we kill anyone, it's like killing our own children,'' says Bawa. ‘‘Every act of violence has repercussions elsewhere. You kill Muslims in Gujarat, they will kill Hindus elsewhere, and it goes on and on and on.'' On one canvas, primitive figures attack a lion ("symbolic,'' says Puri, "of the Sikhs'') while a shepherd-like man on the sidelines plays his flute.
Much of the pain is personal.
Bawa is a Sikh who stopped wearing a turban in 1963 for personal reasons. But he remembers with anger "the vulgar jokes bordering on semi-porn about barah baj gaya and other things'' that he had to deal with during his growing up years.
In 1984, he worked in refugee camps during the riots.
A chapter of his forthcoming biography by Puri is devoted to the Sikh identity.
Bawa recalls an incident earlier this year when, while addressing a gathering in Gujarat, a member of the audience began asking seemingly innocuous questions about Hindu goddesses being painted in the nude. "I realized that he was trying to provoke me into making a comment about Husain's works. I told him, 'Jis kisi ne bhi devi ko paint kiya ho, Mussalman ho ya Hindu, yeh unki shraddha hai.'"
Bawa was initially hesitant to hold the current exhibition because he was unsure of the reactions he would encounter. The works are still strictly not for sale. They will ultimately go to a museum Puri is planning to open in Delhi.
So what does the future hold for one of India's best loved painters? Bawa has begun work on his version of The Last Supper, "where Jesus will be shown as the Asian that he was, and he will be sitting on the floor eating roti with his apostles, not the way the European painters chose to depict him.''
Manjit Bawa - Bio
Manjit Singh Bawa was born in Dhuri in Punjab in 1941.
He studied at the College of Art, Delhi, and did his diploma at the London School of Printing, Essex in Silk-Screen Printing. From 1967 to '71, he worked in London as a silk-screen printer.
A figurative painter from the beginning of his career, Manjit had achieved a summary simplicity of figuration, which is remotely reminiscent of Kalighat Pat's and linear flow and modernist remolding of form we find in Jogen Choudhury. Yet his treatments of form are essentially tonal in contour, closed and compact, without any trace of the gestural application of pigments in thick layers, unlike the modernist practice.
Perhaps the delicately graded tonalities possible in silk-screen forming opened a new possibility of treating form and colour for Manjit, who worked it out in oil, giving his paintings an extra-smooth porcelain glow.
There is an undercurrent of Sufi mysticism in the choice of his subjects: the spiritual themes running through the Guru Granth Sahib, the Punjabi legends of Heer-Ranjha and Sohni-Mahival and their idyllic scenes of love and peace and pristine innocence, the flute-playing Krishna and the cattle, predatory animals and men appearing together, etc.
Manjit did not use landscape elements. Although his pictorial space is flat, he defines the figure's positions by visually relating them at different distances.
The main charm of his paintings is the sense-saturating expanse of colour - fields which create space and define the contour of figures.
During 1967-71, Manjit had one-man shows in London and St. Sebastian in Spain. He returned to India in 1972, and was for some time on the visiting faculty of the College of Art, Delhi.
Later, he had a number of solo shows in India and abroad and participated in "Contemporary Indian Art" at the Royal Academy of Arts, London in 1982, "Modern Indian Painting" at the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C. in 1982, "Contemporary Indian Art" at the Grey Art Gallery, New York, in 1986, and "Coup de Coeur" at Halles de Ulle, Geneva, 1987.
[Courtesy: The Times of India & Indian Express]
December 30, 2008