Krishen Khanna artist, born on 5 July 1925 turned 99 this year. Indian Poet and essayist Ashok Vajpeyi says, “He is widely recognised as the senior master of modern Indian art."
Krishen Khanna quit his bank job with the Grindlays after serving in Bombay and Madras, to take to painting full-time in the early 1960s. He has always been a painter of reality.
Krishen Khanna famous paintings feature common people from the street — the inhabitants of roads, alleys and backways he would have an opportunity to observe while going about his daily life.
In the ‘Bandwallas’ series of works, for instance, the glittering uniforms and high-pitched tunes of the instrument players are only a façade for the stark reality underneath.
Krishen Khanna paintings have people with stoical calm visages such as the fruitseller in his oil on canvas, ‘A Season of Watermelons’ or the young woman in his 1957 oil, ‘Woman with a Basket of Fruits.’
Krishen Khanna painter is now the only surviving member of the Progressive Artist' Group. His life has also been chronicled in the book ‘Krishen Khanna Images in My Time.’