About
More than anything else Modernism is the artist's attitude towards artistic means and issues, towards subject matter, expression, and content, towards colour, drawing and the problem of the nature and purpose of art. It is not, as it is frequently perceived, necessarily a matter of gloom, grimness and dark distortion. By this parlance any artist who paints pictures depicting reality after his own fashion, cannot be summarily dismissed from the ambit of modernism.
It was in those halcyon days of waiting for admission into engineering college that Maniklal Banerjee took up pen and paper to Sketch, got into art school instead, and launched on a journey that was to be his life. Even after he returned to his alma mater, the Govt Art School, Calcutta. as a teacher, where he was to remain for many years, he continued to experiment with his art, impressed equally by the tonal artistry of Abanindranath Tagore, the intricacy of oriental detailing, and the transparency and density of British watercolours.
Examining the artist's oeuvre down the years, are discernible his myriad range of subjects, and his freedom of temperament, wherein he painted what he wished,. and as he wished, making him a modernist in the true sense. Having begun on paper; it was by the late 1960s that he shifted to painting on silk, finding it far more amenable to achieving the effects he desired.
It is usual for artists to dwell on subjects and styles for specific periods of their lives, gradually staging shifts over the years. In this respect Maniklal was discernibly different. His style of painting and the choice of subjects ernbody a kind of simultaneity when viewed across time. Mythology, for instance, or even nature and everyday rural life and people, hold his interest throughout. As devotedly as he painted Radha Krishna as early as 1980, he made works like the Tantra Pancha Mundi Asana and Mahisasurmardini since in the late '90s and 2000s.
Likewise, his drawings down the years show the same consistency in choice and astute detailing of subject and surety of line, making viewing a constant journey back and forth in time. That is not to say, however, that the artist lacked creative innovation. More recent works like Vaishnav and Vaishnavi amply illustrate his experiments with style. It needs some daring to play with green on the nose and forehead as he has done. Again, the Dance of Shiva is a reasonably unusual composition wherein each figure is a complete composition by itself, where unity is achieved so smoothly between the several other figures, rhythm and anatomy dancing in perfect unison with one another.
The artist's sensitivity to nature, too, are manifest in several works like the watercolour on silk Bengal Landscape done in 1984, another of a pair of owls perched on a branch with foliage underneath, drawings of riverbanks, Asadh featuring five flowers, and a host of others. As a matter of fact, nature and life are juxtaposed upon one another almost inextricably in Maniklal's opus. All the while, his colours carry a waif like quality, slightly ephemeral. as if coated in mist. Be it his drawings or his figure studies, his draughtsmanship remains flawless, exemplified through works like the standing woman of Kulkundalini, Radha Krishna, his details of observations in Narmada and Dance of Shiva, Three Girls, Rag Picker, Mahant Rana Nath and much else that is on view. Together with his simplicity of subjects is his penchant for soft ethereal colour treatment, infusing into the works a somewhat distant, mystical order.
Some of his best works also feature simple village folks, based on Maniklal's belief that there is a 'beauty in poverty', wherein the caring and sharing among people of meagre means seem to touch him deeply. The sadhus dancing around Shiva, as well as the women on the Narmada, bathing, washing their hair and clothes are very authentic in their detailing. To make a case in point is the pencil drawing Resting in Chair. While the chair is relatively grand by the standards of rural Bengal, the woman's manner of sitting with her sari pulled up below the knees, is typical in the sultry climate of the region. Maniklal would capture it just thus, without tampering its ethos. It is this unpretentious familiarity of his works that make them most remarkable.
He apparently shared an empathy with animals, too, depicting them at their most beguiling and vulnerable, marking his philosophy of beauty in duress. The sheer helplessness in the eyes and body posture of the two goats, or the wide-eyed dejection expressed by the Langoor-Mother and Baby, establish him beyond doubt as a master of mood and expression.
His selection of subjects and his styles of presentation also project Maniklal as a free man, as true to himself as to his art, viewing the world around him, experiencing it satisfactorily before setting it to brush. Therefore it is that his vision, and consequently his manner of representation, has an authenticity that can come only from heartfelt responses. His portrayals of Mahant Rana Nat, and Ma Sanyasini, done five years apart in time, both exude the same purity and devotion, the earth colours of saffron, yellow and silk white bathing the atmosphere in an air of religiosity and reverence. While Rana Nath is surrounded by an implied halo of colour gradations, Sanyasini is simply placed on a flat background, detached alike in body and mind. The feeling of sanctity that surrounds either seems very genuine, illustrating the artist's credo of painting what appeals to his own sensibilities, instead of hankering for a perceived modernism that held no appeal for him whatsoever.
Add to that his fine control of line, and his colour application on silk, the queen of fabrics, the touch of tenderness and simplicity never leaving him for a moment, and we have an artist who stands apart with his free, unshackled approach to art, never having anchored to any specific mode or style of painting, with the tapestry of drama in real life filling his soul and his picture plane alike. In his own words, "I am a simple man, I don't depict the changing world scenes, I don't like drawing broken forms and splintered images, bhoot-pret. I do not want to startle the viewer with my paintings."
According to an artist friend, there was more than a little of the Baul in him that urged him to look at the world the way he did—uncomplicated and lyrical. wandering from place to place, translating impressions into visual images, just as the Baul converts everything into poetry and music.
- Aruna Bhowmick
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