life and times of paritosh sen
Paritosh Sen was born in September 1918 in Dhaka, a peaceful town then, full of open spaces and with an open waterfront, a racetrack, and in the course of time, a newly built university. Tucked away in the secluded greenery, the city had a bubbling intellectual life. By the time Paritosh was in school, Satyen Bose was working away on his Bose-Einstein statistics and Romesh Chandra Mazumdar was toying with the idea of his magnum opus, Advanced History of India. Mohitlal Mazumdar, the anti-Tagore critic-poet, was being eclipsed by the eighteen-year-old genius Buddhadev Bose. Buddhadev’s little magazine Pragati was drawing the attention of poets, writers, singers and men of letters from both Dhaka and Kolkata.
Paritosh’s father Prasanna Kumar was a famous physician who practised traditional Indian medicine. His was a large joint family which his wife Hemangini Devi managed with a great deal of love and care. The interior of Prasanna Kumar’s household buzzed with the activity of the womenfolk, while servants and maids kept running around on errands. Family life was like a theatre, where between acts new characters entered, played their parts and took their exits. Neighbours would drop by. Relatives would arrive or depart. Marriages and religious festivals were celebrated with great fanfare.
As a child Paritosh was very observant. While talking about his childhood in his illustrated autobiographical writings, he describes people, events, the vagaries of nature and the moods of the seasons in poetic detail. He recalls vividly the men and women who lived in the Sen household and relatives and cousins who visited them during festivals and marriages. While observing them he took note of a variety of inter-personal relationships. His reminiscence is frank, unabashed and adult. As with his brush so with his pen, he renders the sheer physicality of the human body, both dressed and nude, in great detail.
Very early in his youth, after his kite-flying and pigeon-keeping days were over, the cultural life of the town began casting a spell on him. He started going to classical North Indian and modern Bengali musical soirees. He read a lot, particularly Prabashi, a journal that Ramananda Chatterjee edited along with the Modern Review. In these monthly magazines, Chatterjee published coloured plates of the neo-Bengal School artists, Abanindranath and Gaganendranath Tagore and their followers Nandalal Bose, Kshitindranath Mazumdar and Asit Halder. These were done in watercolour, wash, and tempera. They evoked the Ajanta and Bagh paintings of classical antiquity, or medieval miniatures that depicted Mughal and Rajput courtly scenes, the Radha-Krishna legends, the life of Buddha and Chaitanya, mythological events from the epics and Puranas along with scenes from the Arabian Nights, and the Rubaiyats of Omar Khayyam. There were also landscapes by Abanindranath and others. It was a world that touched a sympathetic cord in Paritosh’s mind and stirred up his love for the by-gone glories of India and Asia. The national movement for independence was at its peak and these paintings evoked a strong feeling in him against imperial misrule.
Paritosh, however, soon tired of such pictorial images. They were exquisite but a little removed from everyday life. Very soon he was to discover the qualities he was searching for, in the works of Devi Prosad Roychowdhury, which were also reproduced in Prabashi. They too were in watercolours. In them men, women, children, animals and trees seemed to be more robust and down to earth. There was an erotic sensibility in them that strongly attracted him. Devi Prosad was also a writer who could weave macabre and satirical tales and describe his big game hunting expeditions with great gusto. When Paritosh passed his matriculation, Devi Prosad was the principal of the Government School of Art and Craft, Madras. His fame had spread throughout undivided British India.
Paritosh wanted to join Devi Prosad’s distinguished band of students even though his father had died and his guardians were reluctant to let him join a profes sion that was not considered fit for a gentleman. He had written to Devi Prosad and received an affirmative answer. He ran away to Madras.
Paritosh’s apprenticeship was full of excitement and joy. Devi Prosad taught his students the art of being frank and unconventional, to look at life without prejudice, to live without inhibition and fear. Above all he taught them to be polite and self-respecting. He was a devotee of the visual world of European classical sculptures, which also included such great past masters as Michelangelo and recent ones such as Rodin and Bourdelle. Through this slightly open door, Paritosh had his first glimpse of modern art.
As the years went by, his understanding of world art was enriched through travels abroad. From impressionism and post-impressionism, cubism and expressionism, Paritosh has made his way through the movements that followed abstract expressionism—op, pop, minimal and conceptual art—that led right on to the rush of post-modernism. He has always believed in contemporaneity and relevance. In the light of this belief, he has tried to balance his experiences of harmony and discord. He has been a witness to the violence that erupted both before and after the Second World War. Since the Bengal Famine in 1943, he has observed a great deal of pain and suffering and the almost total brutalization of humankind. He has expressed his anguish directly and through symbols. His aesthetic adventures had searched for meaningful form but not at the cost of technical skill. He is convinced that art should be measured not by the depth of the feeling that inspires the work, but the accuracy of its expression.
Paritosh’s work has always been immediately intelligible. He has used everyday domestic and outdoor scenes, men, women, and children at work, at play or in lonely moments. During festivals they are seen coming together, and at times in a tense but restive mood. His contribution to contemporary art has been his ability to hold on to his individual talent and artistic integrity in the midst of the breakdown of the norms of civilization and culture. His images, even when they verge on fantasy, depict the life of ordinary people. Sometimes there are political allusions and personal references in Paritosh’s work. His paintings have elements of obscurity but they are never incomprehensible. The breadth of appeal is beyond controversy as it is direct as well as visionary. His true greatness lies in his relentless visual explorations. His paintings are often serious but at times they are very funny. In moments of anger, he can ridicule mercilessly. Paritosh is not altogether pessimistic as he still holds on to a vestige of faith in humanity. Taken as a whole, his works evoke an empathy that verges on compassion. Technically, there are elements and rough prototypes that anticipate the new visual devices of his younger contemporaries.
From 1943 onwards, Paritosh Sen has produced one remarkable series after another. With each series, one notices a gradual deepening of intensity and a widening of his coverage of art. The paintings, in spite of their obvious differences, share certain characteristics. There is always a vivid image that dominates a single canvas or a triptych. Within the edges of a canvas there is always a visible or invisible structure, a geometric design, that holds the painting together. Except for a brief period when he flirted with pure abstraction, his paintings have by and large been figurative. The figures are naturalistic and substantial but non-academical and unconventional. Highly stylized according to the needs of each work, they are inflated or deflated, distorted, elongated and foreshortened. Luminous colours and shades are engulfed within the confines of strong rhythmic or discordant jerky lines. Nothing is ever blurred or indefinite. The colours are wild. In his earlier paintings done mostly in oils, Paritosh used thick heavy pigments with high impastos. His recent work is mostly in acrylic, or in mixed media, so that his paints are smooth and areas of flat spaces dominant. These areas confront each other. An effective visual harmony emerges through tonal and atonal cords and discords.
Throughout his career, Paritosh has worked with a variety of media—watercolour, tempera, oil, acrylic and mixed media. In his drawings he has used pen and ink, black brush, charcoal, crayon, pastel, pencil, and a mixture of all of them. In his own fashion, he has been true to each medium, experimenting with their potentials and utilizing them to the fullest. In spite of the apparent visual family resemblance and obvious technical distinctiveness of each series, they are sustained by the immense strength of his stylised drawings.
The formative years of Paritosh’s life as an artist are marked by three distinct developments. At first he painted rural scenes with great fervor. In the second stage, form gained in importance. In the third he began to value sun-drenched colours. In one of his early paintings, a mother and child are placed in a palm grove. The azure sky and textures of palm leaves create an atmosphere of blissful peace. Although the works of this period are stylised, the people and the landscapes have organic strength. The lines are strong and fluid. The palette is limited, but the colours are vibrant. The style has affinities with Devi Prosad’s approach to painting. Watering a Tulsi Plant presents a bird’s eye view. The short pedestal plant in the middle of a courtyard is surrounded by tiled roofs of rural huts. In this work the receding planes and vanishing points merge into completeness. In a later painting, Third-class Compartment, done in 1946 in gouache on board to create the effect of a third-class compartment the earlier experiment in geometry is carried to its logical end. The crowded compartment is depicted from top and bottom angles, which correspond to the circular movement of the eye.
While in Daly College, Paritosh discovered the Impressionists and the post-Impressionists. He was particularly attracted to Van Gogh and Gauguin. From them he learnt the method of simplification of form to its bare essentials. They taught him the procedure of heightening colours to a series of complements and contrasts. In a way some of his paintings of this period can be looked at as meditations on post-Impressionism.
In 1937 Paritosh saw an exhibition of Jamini Roy’s works, organized by Gaganendranath Tagore in the Samabay Mansion Hall of the Society of Oriental Art in Kolkata. Roy had rejected the notions of sophisticated western art in favour of the unsophisticated primeval art of rural and tribal communities and used a flat and linear style. Paritosh noticed that Roy did not imitate nature in his use of colours. The sky would be sulphur yellow, a tree trunk Indian red, a woman could take on any one of the three raw primaries and a pond could be translucent green. Paritosh quickly understood why Roy had gone beyond contemporary practices to tradition, and how he reinterpreted it. Paritosh ‘s own work took an expressionistic turn. His shapes became strong and simple. His figures were at first flat and linear but by stages they took on sculptural proportions. He emphasized theme over subject and rawness of colour against subdued mixed hues. Paritosh and his ‘Calcutta Group’ colleagues were able to give an intense urban and intellectual glow to modern Indian painting and sculpture. Although they retained the figure and the specifics of objects depicted, they rejected the narrative mode and opted for painterly abstractions. Indian art for the first time lacked a story and began to improvise on pure visual themes. Thereafter the group explored and emphasized the non-narrative nature of eye-level easel painting, the unlimited possibility of colour and the flatness of composition.
Paritosh’s art was transformed during his four-year stay in Paris. Many Indian artists were present in Paris at the time. Nirod Mazumdar, Akbar Padamse, F.N. Souza and Raza were there in the post-war years. Soon Ramkumar and Probhas Sen joined them. Paritosh thus had an opportunity to share his thoughts with these artists. Many major European artists also worked in Paris when Paritosh was there. In Beaux Arts he learnt mural painting and in the Louvre he took a course in History of Art.
Paritosh met Picasso at an exhibition, and the great master invited him to his home. Here Paritosh showed Picasso several of his paintings. Picasso praised some of them. Nirod Mazumdar introduced Paritosh and Shanko Chowdhury to Brancusi. Paritosh’s cup of life was brimming over. Slowly he began to unlearn what he had learnt back home.
Paritosh was in Paris a second time in 1962. Invited by the French government, he worked on a type-face design based on the handwriting of Rabindranath Tagore. The next decade saw him visiting many countries. He went to the US on a Rockefeller grant. For one year he was an artist in residence in Maryland and Pennsylvania. As a guest in Russia of the government of the former USSR, he studied the monumental War Memorial Sculptures.
After his return from Paris in 1954, Paritosh taught in a school in Netarhat in the Palamau District of Bihar. From 1964 to 1976 he was on the staff of the Regional Institute of Printing Technology, Jadavpur where he lectured on design and layout. Since his retirement he has become a fulltime painter and even at eighty paints as furiously as he did in his youth.
His travels abroad have enlarged his vision. The diversity of his experiences has pushed him into relentless experimentation. He has oscillated between various styles, trying out a variety of techniques. Restlessness is the hallmark of his paintings. Each of the series he has exhibited since 1964 has a major theme. There is a series he did on wood depicting a babu and a barber, with men singing and a country drum beating during the holi fesival. Then there is a series that has music as the theme centering on Bade Gulam Ali Khan—the great singer of North Indian classical music. In such work, sweeping lines plunge into luminous colours and emerge in most unusual places to trace the contour of shapes and subtly build the wholeness of the form.
Two of Paritoh’s longer series are especially memorable. One is a series of black and white drawings which depicts pregnant women, nude and semi-nude figures in solitude, engrossed in day-dreaming. In the other, the theme is the death wish. The protagonists are motorcycle riders riding at breakneck speed. Paritosh had just returned from the US where he saw the disturbing spectacle of motorcycle gangs zipping through the highway. This image, coupled with the violence associated with the Naxalite movement in India which had reached a peak at the time, forced Paritosh to find appropriate objective correlatives. Over and above the paintings, Paritosh placed a mechanical contraption called ‘The Toy’. A paper-pulp sculpture, looking like a very aged version of Paritosh, is made to ride a cycle by pressing a button. Then there is the sound of a bullet. The pulp man flounders and falls on the handle bar. One would have to press the button to start the show again. Paritosh portrayed the recklessness of these riders to comment on social issues–blind competitiveness, passion for speed and efforts at self-projection (the riders have an insecure feeling about their masculinity). It is interesting to note that the riders look like Paritosh. There are one or two exceptions. The rest do not have identifiable faces. He is perhaps trying to come to grips with his own violence and that of the others. The basic drawing underlying each work seemingly has the spinning movement of the wheels, not having rhythm so much as a kind of motion. The movement of the wheels takes up the total canvas and the spatial interludes are few and far between, signifying motion and speed. The individuals however are left with no emotion or empathy. The wildness of self-centered life and pas sion move them on, leaving no room for introspection or interpersonal relationship.
Like Rembrandt, Paritosh returned to self-portraiture again and again. His portraits, like those of Rembrandt are also narcissistic, but not exactly studies of personality, or the effects of tragic circumstances or mood. They have rather a serio-comical aspect as if he is making fun of himself. Yet in them and in his portraits of his wife there are slight distortions and stylization. In the end though he seeks monumentality and cohesion. The fluidity of lines indicates a firm structure although only a few colours are used.
There is another series that he did after coming back from America.. The series has two notable paintings. In one a buxom American black young woman is sitting on the floor beside the window with a bewildered and lost look. In another—a large triptych—Paritosh is tempted to bring in a narrative. On the left panel, a rather fat and fleshy American white girl is in a cubicle with a glass revolving door, watched among others by a sinister looking gangster. In the middle panel she is relaxing in bed, almost naked, while a sinister-looking man enters through the back door with his own key. In the right panel, we see the girl after she has been raped, with the round bedside table upturned and frightened children peeping through the glass. It is a pictorial parable on urban crime, mirroring every sort of violence done on a global scale, from drug trafficking to religious and ethnic cleansing to war.
For several years now Paritosh has taken to acrylic as his main medium, although he also uses pastels, charcoal and mixed media. He has moved away from satirizing politicians, although the criminalizing of politics and life still appears as a theme in his painting. He has painted an eagle about to devour its prey. There is passion in the lines and violence in the detailing and the colour, as if making a prophetic yet imaginative denouncement.
Paritosh knows civilization has become ‘an old bitch gone in the teeth.’ But there has been a gradual moving away from such subjects. He portrays people, the exuberance of nature, birds and animals with strong feeling. Every painting is done with intense conviction and becomes a celebration of life. His love for woman is boundless. There is also a great deal of witticism in his work, although his humour can sometimes become slightly obscene.. There are two large triptychs he painted in 2001 where the theme is women—particularly women in their leisure moments, unobserved by men. One of them pictures a prosperous looking woman taking a shower in a modern tiled bathroom. This is done from various angles, whose twists and turns have a macabre dance-like quality. The second set has three seated women done from three angles. Paritosh has ventured into a humorous erotic art. The proportions or artistic canons are slightly twisted to give a comic effect. The head is either a bit smaller or larger than the body and flesh seems to sag and wobble and betray frailty. The colours harmonize with the rhythms of the fluid lines. Then there is a set of more than a dozen paintings that delineate a woman’s routine for a day. They do not exclude her toilet and cooking. Then there are some animal studies. Each canvas has interiors described in terms of vertical and horizontal lines with linear indication of planes. Within this frame, the geometric structure and figures are made to balance. Bright and subdued colours are juxtaposed as points and counterpoints. They then coalesce into what can be called a graphic sonata.
Paritosh is the doyen of living Indian artists. His works span over 65 years. He has witnessed great creativity and the senseless destruction of the twentieth century and reacted to events in his own fashion. He is always alert to the happenings in the fields of intellect and art. This gives him the ability to assimilate a variety of moods and trends into his very own personal style. He has never painted pretty stuff to beguile the innocent. This integrity both at the aesthetic and ethical levels is reflected in his work and makes him one of the finest painters of our time.
Sandip Sarkar is an art critic based in Kolkata
Paritosh Sen was born in September 1918 in Dhaka, a peaceful town then, full of open spaces and with an open waterfront, a racetrack, and in the course of time, a newly built university. Tucked away in the secluded greenery, the city had a bubbling intellectual life. By the time Paritosh was in school, Satyen…