“No outer happening can seed inner composition. It must happen to you personally and so my first beginning as an Artist was Partition.”
– Satish Gujral, A Brush with Life (2012)
In a documentary on a magisterial Indian artist, the narrator Kabir Bedi proclaims in his mighty voice: “The span of his prolific works spans the history of independent India. His art springs from life but does not mirror it… A man of many talents and even greater resolve, an inspiration for everyone who wants to break the constrictions of circumstance.” The documentary in question is A Brush with Life (2012) and the artist is none other than the prolific painter, sculptor, muralist, architect, and interior designer Satish Gujral. Satish Gujral famous paintings include ‘Days of Glory’, ‘Meera Bai’, ‘Mourning en Masse’, and many more.
Born on 25th December 1925 in Jhelum in pre-partition West Punjab, a swimming accident at the age of eight terminally impaired Gujral’s hearing and severely damaged one of his legs, leaving him bedridden for a long period. This period of enforced idleness along with the sudden death of his brother Raj brought about immense despondency and isolation which made him question his sanity. To assuage the troubled Satish, his father introduced him to adult Urdu literature in the form of Ghalib and Iqbal which were to have a lasting impact on his psyche. It was during this period that he started doodling for fun and though his images were not so significant, his father decided to put him in the Mayo School of Art in Lahore established by the Britishers.
The curriculum was designed by Lockwood Kipling, father of Rudyard Kipling. It was here that Gujral was introduced to techniques for stone and woodcarving, metal smithery, clay modelling, drawing and design, scale drawing and copying ground plans and elevations of old buildings. The multiplicity of training here laid the foundation for his lifelong artistic eclecticism. His family was instrumental in developing his politics. Just as his father introduced him to revolutionary poets and writers, his mother was a foster mother to Bhagat Singh while his brother Inder, who later became the 12th prime minister of India, opened the world of Marxist politics and social revolution to him.
His hunger for knowledge brought him to study painting in 1944 at the J.J. School of Art in Bombay. Here, Gujral learnt Western art alongside the soon-to-be greats of Indian art. He befriended V. S. Gaitonde and was supported actively by Pran Nath Mago. Though he came in contact with the Progressive Artists Group (PAG), he was reluctant to accept PAG’s total adaptation of techniques and vocabulary of European Expressionism and Cubism. Satish Gujral painting style is an ode to a modernism of his own which was rooted in Indian traditions.
Satish Gujral partition paintings (titled “Partition Series”) were first exhibited in New Delhi in 1952, which thrust him into the limelight. A first-hand witness of the horrific violence of partition, the trauma of the event found its expression in his paintings. He says, “This experience sunk in me so deeply that after Partition when I began to paint without any conscious effort, this human suffering, this brutality of man to man, became my theme.” Satish Gujral paintings capture the chaos, anguish, suffering, and despair of the migrants. The enlarged figures of wailing men and women are twisted within the swathes of clothes covering them. In their attempt to free themselves from it, they seem to be stretching the canvas on all sides. It seems that the canvas cannot contain these images of human suffering.
Shortly after the success of this series, Gujral left for Mexico on a scholarship to study at Palacio Nationale de Belles Artes with Mexican Muralists Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros. The mobilisation of murals in public spaces as instruments of social change in Mexico as well as his close friendship with Rivera, Siqueiros, and Frida Kahlo influenced his use of materials and subject matter. In this Untitled work shaped like a circular disc, Gujral uses a modernist vocabulary with wood as the canvas, achieving tactility through raised terracotta elements of different elevations, and inserting scripts and popular images as a comment on contemporary times. On his return to India, he was commissioned to do several significant mural projects, for instance, the one at Gandhi Bhawan, Chandigarh.
During this period, he was also commissioned to do a lot of portraits for Nehru and his family which got him in touch with his future wife. Marriage informed Satish Gujral painting techniques which brought life and colour to his existence and slowly his angst and rebellion receded to give way to other concerns as an artist. After dabbling with modernist and abstract machine-age material sculptures with tropes of Indian tradition, he tried his hand at architecture. In the early 80s, he was appointed to design the Belgian Embassy in New Delhi leading to a landmark structure which won him the Order of the Crown from the Belgian Government while the embassy building was chosen as one of the 1000 best structures of the 20th century by the International Forum of Architects.
In the late 90s, his brief experience with the cochlear implant to improve his hearing influenced Satish Gujral painting style, resulting in works that blended the abstract and the figurative. Consider one of Satish Gujral paintings, Untitled (Kite) which uses overlapping images to produce a captivating effect. He says, “You can see the outline of one behind the other clearly. It’s like my memory of sound. It is there, and it is not there.” Over the years Satish Gujral painting techniques mixed mediums, forms, and subject matter. Lyrical motifs and exquisite use of colour have marked Satish Gujral paintings. For instance, towards the end of his career, he also responded to the popular phenomenon of IPL cricket with his brush, capturing the rhythm of the moving body and the performance of the sport.
In Satish Gujral, we find an indomitable spirit that no single medium nor subject was able to bind. The versatility and range of Satish Gujral paintings were such that this article cannot imagine doing justice to them. As the critic Ranjit Hoskote writes in his obituary to Gujral, who passed away on March 26, 2020: “Borders, arbitrarily drawn and brutally enforced, could have constrained Satish Gujral. But he refused to allow such oppressive constructs to define his choices, whether in life or art…In attending to his artistic trajectory, we would greatly enrich our sense of India’s art history as well as its cultural history.”
References
- Outlook: It was a defining moment I went to art school
- Satish Gujral.com
- Zikredilli- Satish Gujral Partition Series
- Brush With Life- Documentary
- The Wire- Satish Gujral Obituary
- NY Times- Satish Gujral
Image Courtesy – World Architecture Community
Google Doodle Celebrates the 93rd Birthday of Polish Sculptor Magdalena Abakanowicz
Contributor
