CURATORIAL NOTE
Kartick Chandra Pyne was born to an aristocratic family of gold merchants in 1931 in Kolkata. Deeply religious, the family had a rich cultural atmosphere and an interest in art at home. One of his brothers, Fulchand Pyne, is a noted sculptor, and Ganesh Pyne also had distant familial connections with him. Those who knew Kartick Pyne saw him as a prolific but introverted artist who maintained a low public profile, showing a certain reluctance to the glamorous world of contemporary art and the art market.
In the post-independence era, when he enrolled at the Government Art College in the early 1950s, an aspiration was widespread among the young Indian artists of the new nation-state to carve a prominent place for themselves in the international art scene. Of the Bengali artists of his generation, Kartick Pyne was amongst the few who were prompt to recognize the spirit of the age and the new direction modern Indian art was taking. Moving away from academic realism, he drew upon the styles and idioms of the principal modern artists of the West, such as Matisse, Gauguin, Marc Chagall and Seurat and dominant trends of Western art movements like Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Primitivism and Surrealism. However, what is significant is undoubtedly not how much his work was derivative but how, in the specific stylistic, conceptual and emotional matrix of his painting, those influences – local, national and foreign – were received and assimilated, making his vibrant work exemplary of Indian Modernism.
Religion had a substantial impact on his life, as well as on his work. But, he was more interested in the affective and visual economy of the symbols and images and their subtle connections to theology rather than in making religious art. The recurrent use of the image of a lovelorn peacock with its train fully spread in his paintings intimates his deep connection to Vaishnavism. There can be many more, such as the woman with the sacred Jaba or Bandhuka flower (Hibiscus Flower) and the bull’s head against the red background with a peacock feather on it. Later in his life, he did fewer paintings based on mythological themes, but one can find them latent in much of his imagery. His exploration of the relationship between the male drivers – be it a boatman, rickshaw puller or bullock cart puller – and the women commuters in his paintings indicate the story of Nauka Vihar of Radha Krishna as its point of reference. The allegorical imagination – so rich in fantasy and central to Kartick Pyne’s entire oeuvre – is, in fact, a space of translation, a site in which various heterogeneous elements from diverse sources come together, creating a great coalescence of form. His paintings, therefore, can poetically be called a place of the hidden moon, a place of reconciliation of the sensible and divine worlds, of intense emotions and ascetic detachment, which constitute the aesthetics of his mature works. As a young boy growing up in Kolkata and also in Sodepur, near Khardaha, West Bengal, one of the prominent seats of Shaiva and Vaishnava-Sahajiya cults of Bengal at the bank of Ganga, he imbibed the syncretic essence of the mystic spiritual life early on, which found remarkable manifestations in his modern paintings in the later life.
Besides this, Kartick Pyne painted a large body of birds, fishes, animals and landscape, exploring elective affinities between the world seen and experienced and imagined. The experience of seeing Kartick Pyne’s vibrant, colourful paintings is encountering a strange, exogenous world in which women, nature, birds and animals are inseparably interconnected, creating remarkable plasticity and figural kinship– the non-duality of seeming duality.
- Arkaprava Bose
