close look
fusion of archetypal image and archaic form
The art of Rabin Mondal
ROMAIN MAITRA works through RABIN MONDAL's oeuvre to attempt an examination of the brutishness which is unique to this Indian modernist master
I have within me a depth of pain and melancholy that life has only increased and of which my art, if God answers my prayers, is only the rather imperfect expression and flowering. – Rabin Mondal
Even though the 'simplicity' of primitive African art is a myth as it is led by stern aesthetic conventions, it served as an effective cannonball to strike at the established canons of nineteenth century salon art. The stir generated by primitive art in Picasso, Modigliani and Brancusi, to name a few, offered unceasing possibilities – from reaching down to the autochthonous to a radical questioning of academic naturalism. However, Picasso's quest for the basic geometry of human form in the arts of Oceania and African sculptures was not so much to familiarise himself with the cultural identity and life of those societies from where they had evolved as to comprehend the potential of the primitive form.
Even though the 'simplicity' of primitive African art is a myth as it is led by stern aesthetic conventions, it served as an effective cannonball to strike at the established canons of nineteenth century salon art. The stir generated by primitive art in Picasso, Modigliani and Brancusi, to name a few, offered unceasing possibilities – from reaching down to the autochthonous to a radical questioning of academic naturalism. However, Picasso's quest for the basic geometry of human form in the arts of Oceania and African sculptures was not so much to familiarise himself with the cultural identity and life of those societies from where they had evolved as to comprehend the potential of the primitive form.
In Indian art, however, the 'primitivist' discourse took a different turn – from this stylistic aspect – towards its cultural importance when 'lowbrow' and ritual art, evoking indigenous sentiments and values, were revived through nationalist ideals and aspirations since the mid-nineteenth century onwards. Kalighat pats were perhaps the first to receive prominence and, as Partha Mitter has elaborately argued, the primitivism that identified the lowbrow folk, popular and tribal art was incorporated by leading Indian artists during the early twentieth century within the dominant backdrop of the colonial aesthetic ideology of Victorian art. However, due to its protean nature, with shifting meanings and significance, 'primitivism as a form of critical modernity' offered different possibilities to different Indian artists.1
Rabin Mondal's approach to art, however, was rather towards the style of primitivism than its cultural and epistemological importance. A thoroughbred urbanite, who grew up and lived in the industrial town of Howrah, he had undergone severe struggle in his life, to be pithy, to establish himself as an artist. He also faced the creative dilemma over choosing his style and approach to art. Oriental art of the Bengal School did not suit his temperament. Nor was he drawn to the dictates of academic realism. Instead, he found the soi-disant unsophisticated idioms of tribal and folk art more appealing as they offered simplicity, roughness and raw vitality. The social ambience of Howrah that bristled with the working masses contributed doubtless to his dark and unrelenting artistic vision through myriad expressions of melancholic and tortured faces and figures. Indeed, it was suggestive that he once quoted a statement of François Millet in one of his Bengali essays, 'Art is not a pleasure trip, it is a mill that grinds.'2
Mondal's rough treatment of the surface, primitive configuration of human bodies and technique of thick pigmentation refer to his unique style, although the thematic undertone of moral revulsion in his works could be also traced in the works of his contemporaries, although their styles varied from his. A notable mention should be of Nikhil Biswas whose struggling figures and horror-struck spectral faces (specially done in charcoal) were denigrated denizens of the arena of darkness and the shades. In the early 1963, when Mondal and some artists of his generation like Biswas, Bijan Chowdhury, Prokash Karmakar and Gopal Sanyal and others formed the group 'Calcutta Painters', their Manifesto never touched the issues on the language and form of artistic practice. Instead, it focused overwhelmingly on the human condition, on the deterioration of values and moral fibres in and around their lives while stating, among other things, 'we see that corruption has entered into the very minute crevices of our lives', and 'truthfulness as a matter ridiculed.'
However, it may be noted here that that also in 1963 an opposite tendency emerged in contemporary Indian art. J Swaminathan and other members of 'Group 1890' held their first exhibition in Delhi that year, and in their Manifesto their individualist concern was quite contrary to the social concern of their contemporaries in Bengal as it read: “For us, there is no anticipation in the creative act. It is an act through which the personality of the artist evolves in itself in its incessant becoming… Art for us is not born out of a preoccupation with the human condition.”
It was indeed a wonderful occasion to witness Mondal's last retrospective 'Selected Paintings and Drawings (1956-2009)' in Kolkata, followed by 'The Chronicler of Hope' (with only a few changes of exhibits) after he reached 80. However, as happens with most retrospectives of any senior artist, the collections in the exhibitions were far too sparse to accommodate the corpus and variety of his work during these fifty-three years.
From the early phase of his paean to the collective human toil emerged the phase of hopelessness and despair in the early 1960s. In this phase, he betrayed a sense of anguish and despair through his prototypes of prostitutes, pimps, tramps and the destitute all articulated with an intuitive semblance of Cubist and Expressionist idioms. However, the 'King and Queen' series from the late sixties to the late seventies constituted his primitivist phase that he merged with his contemporary time. He absorbed the spirit of folk and tribal art for plasticity of form and unsophisticated vigour that still remains the hallmark of his art although his latest works (mainly shown in the exhibition) exude, I dare say, a tempered classicism and suaveness of expression.
If we follow his works chronologically, we find that gradually he switched more and more over to single figures from group figures in the recent years and his canvases comprised areas more and more with glowing colours shorn practically of any backdrop detail. The most recent of these are the solitary squat figures with disproportionately short legs as in Adverse Counsellor and Envious Soul (both – oil on canvas, 2008) who stand poised in neatly decorated apparels in the middle of the canvases, with backgrounds of soft tonal pigmentation. However, to me the unique exhibit in this genre was Victim of Gambling (oil on canvas, 2008) representing the denuding of Draupadi after the game of chess. Her two arms were ingeniously drawn as part of the circular drapes around her as if caught up in the force of its swinging momentum.
'Protest' (oil on canvas, 2008), depicting four nude women, is another example of invoking symmetry and restraint even if it refers to those elderly Manipuri women who stripped themselves totally bare and protested against the atrocities of the Assam rifles. Each of their bodies is being divided in chiaroscuro and against slanted plank-like backdrop in red. This is an example where Mondal uniquely blends in these figures a timeless petrifaction with a broodingly pensive mien to denote the sordid event in our contemporary history.
There is something more than individual identity that pervades the figures; they convey a general notion about the battered human condition and the courage to fight it. This generality is also evident in his shearing of the narrative detailing from his paintings. As years have gone by we have seen, particularly since the last dozen years, that the subsidiary figures, like for example, in his 'King' series during 1975-76, had been disappearing and only solitary or group figures appearing to convey a congealed idea that would generalise human struggle through his rough and rugged figurative art. 'Interference' (acrylic on canvas, 2006) is another instance of restrained linear symmetry in which three almost-bare, slanted human figures, all with single legs, and a human-faced cat are poised against similarly slanted plank-like forms.
With a ragged texture created with forceful jibes of brush and spatula, his 'Child' (oil on canvas, 2007) digressed from his usual style to reduce the figure to its most simplistic form that effectively combines child art with art brute. There were examples of his similar absorption of the pristine and monolithic iconic forms of village deities both in his 'Deity' (acrylic on canvas, 2001) and in 'Queen' (mixed media on board, 1988) in which he maintained the simplicity of form and the chromatic semblance of these vermilion smeared deities of Bengal.
His 'Face' (acrylic on board, 2002) was a typical study with thick outlines and of quick jabbing of brush that broke the pigment unevenly that created mild surface tension. Besides, as he is wont, light and shade were apposed suggestively in the Cubist way. Like his other latest works, it also betrayed his penchant for temperance of expression. We may recall here his earlier manner of drawing Heads and Faces during the 1970s and '80s with scant or almost no forehead, long noses with pronounced nostrils at their base and when the irises haven't yet disappeared from their eyes. In these, their muted cries of wrecked hopes and affliction and poverty-laden miens were more prominent in their timelessly vacant eyes. All these faces had been the typified pictorial representations of what Mondal wrote in his personal diary (entry on 29.06.1992): 'Yet, I must own up that the faces are familiar to me;/ Through the cycle of creation and chaos/ They return to existence,/ As if in my dreams and waking hours/ Those faces peep deep into my unconscious,/ And cry out, Look at your stark naked Self/ In your own mirror. Whereas, in the light of civilisation,/ I have always wanted to push them away./ Even then, the faces crowd me in, again and again,/ To remind me of my sins…'3
For more than four decades, Mondal has been painting and drawing animals, fusing the simplicity of a tribal artist with the chromatic exuberance of a sophisticated Fauvist. They carry about them a sort of totemic significance, strongly suggestive of an existential nexus between the man and the beast. His beasts are not always animals but disconcertingly represent the dark recesses of the human psyche and many of them have human mask-like faces and skins with tattoos of recondite designs like those on his human figures. These humanised beasts could well be the other side of the foil of his dehumanised men and women.
One wonders where are Mondal's early paintings during late fifties and early sixties concerned with the group identity of the various working men – whether at the potter's wheel, or spreading their fishing nets, or unloading bags of crop and so on. The 'Man and Machine-II' (acrylic on canvas, 2003) in the show, however, was only a reconstructed copy from his 'Man and Machine' series of this early period. His typical Cubist phase of this period was also missing. However, there was a representative example of his fascination for Van Gogh in 'Lovers' (watercolour, 1957) which, he told me, was inspired after the prints he saw of the Dutch master in an exhibition of painters from France in Calcutta. Also missing were his preliminary designs for mural of the early eighties.
Mondal's paintings do not share the same formal 'ugliness' of the distended human bodies and disinterred faces of a Frances Bacon, the terrifying expressionism of a Wilhelm de Kooning or, closer home, the unsettling distortions of flaccid flesh with sagging folds of a Jogen Chowdhury. Instead, He has arrived in his signature style through an inner process of construction and destruction and settled with the synthesis of two elements: representational formulation through archetypal image and stylised iconography through archaic form. Besides these, the mass and volume of his figurative art are so much imbued with sculptural quality that we often wonder why he never seriously tried his hands in this medium.
References
- Partha Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism: India's Artists and the Avant-garde 1922-1947, New Delhi, Oxford Univ. Press, 2007 (See the chapter: 'The Indian Discourse of Primitivism')
- In his book of compiled essays in Bengali 'Shilpabhavana'
- Translated by Santo Datta and mentioned in his book After the Fall: Time, Life & Art of Rabin Mondal, Delhi Art Gallery Private Ltd, 2005
Romain Maitra is an art critic and independent curator of contemporary art resident in Kolkata. He is also a cultural anthropologist by intellectual persuasion and worked as a consultant at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris.