PAINTINGS FROM AND OF THE EARTH
An exhibition at Emami Art that looks at the early works by NS Bendre his drawings, sketches and watercolours
Going through the sketches and watercolours by artist N S Bendre one becomes aware that his feminine muses were mostly rural saree-clad women who were often not aware of his gaze as they appear lost in their own world of contemplation. One such work is a quick pen and ink drawing dated 1984, a side profile of a young girl sitting slightly hunched over looking inward in thoughtfulness.
Another work that caught one’s attention is of the monolithic rock carving at Ellora Kailash cave/temple, a UNESCO World Heritage Site located in the Aurangabad district of Maharashtra, which is a must-see for all artists and art history students. Here too, we see a saree-clad lady in the foreground who almost leads our vision into the chariot-shaped cave-temple.
This exhibition brings together some forty rarely shown works on paper from across the artist’s career, revealing the intimate bonding he felt with the world. From the beginning of his long and astonishingly prolific career, N S Bendre explored the earth, travelling widely and producing a large body of drawings, sketches, and watercolours of the sites, landscapes and people that make up a significant part of his oeuvre. Much of his unique sensibility, the vernacular charms in colouration and depiction of human figures in his mature work, was shaped by his rich travel experiences and lifelong habit of drawing from observation.
“Best known as a painter, Bendre had a lifelong habit of travelling and drawing pictures from life and nature. The exhibition offers a glimpse of his large body of drawings, sketches and watercolours that form a distinctive part of his oeuvre,” observes Richa Agarwal the CEO of Emami Art.
An Indore-born artist, Narayan Shridhar Bendre (1910-1992) studied painting in the State School of Art, excelling in academic realism. He was a contemporary of Nandalal Bose, Ram Kinkar Baij and Benode Behari Mukherjee, and a winner of several medals in the Bombay Art Society‘s Annual Exhibitions.
He was admired for his skills in academic style and the chromatic brilliance of watercolours.
However, the growing popularity of Amrita Sher-Gil and her first-hand acquaintance with the art world of the West in the 1940s had a profound impact on him— he visited the United States, England, France and Belgium in 1947–48 which further encouraged him to adapt to the new languages of modern art, moving away from academic realism. What he came up with later on was an interesting fusion of both the academic realism that he so loved and the Modernism that was being touted as all the rage at the time. Bendre in that sense was an innovator of his own stylistic approach.
Many do not talk of this but Bendre also formed the ‘Baroda Group’. In 1950, he moved to Baroda as the first Reader and Head of the Department of Painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts. He remained there until 1966, becoming Dean of the Faculty in 1959. He was instrumental in laying the foundations of the ‘new programme’ at the Faculty, which was surprisingly looking into experiments with Cubist, Expressionist and abstract tendencies!
Bendre also produced his own paintings during this period, works that are very different from his early realist works and for which he is so celebrated in his youth. In fact, his painting The Thorn (1955) won him the National Award from the Lalit Kala Akademi. The protagonist of his painting continues to be the rural woman, who, in this instance has been rendered in a slight cubistic manner as she stops to remove a thorn from her foot, while taking support of a tree. Interestingly, the woman with a thorn in her foot is a subject that appealed to Raja Ravi Verma as well, in his famed painting Shakuntala Removing a Thorn from Her Foot (1898). One is naturally tempted to wonder if Bendre was obliquely referring to the same myth when he did his painting.
Reportedly Bendre used it to get closer to the object, exploring the magic of mimesis, the sense that the picture has an organic bond with what it is a picture of. According to John Berger, this corporeality, which only drawing and no other art mediums can have, breathes life to Bendre’s numerous study-works and sketches of ‘village women and rural scenes,’ a glimpse of which the show offers to us.
Bendre once wrote, “I belong to this earth. I walk on this earth. I eat on this earth, and I don’t think of anything but this earth. Things here are like a library to me.”
This is how one totally understands his continued interest in the rural women as a recurring motif of the earth.
One can view the show online at Ongoing Exhibition Details (emamiart.com) or if in Kolkata visit the Emami Art museum as the show is on till December 12, 2021
Text by Georgina Maddox
Image Courtesy: Emami Art
Find more about the Artist and Gallery here:
https://www.emamiart.com/ongoing-exhibition-details/?exhibition=NS+Bendre
