As the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi celebrates the 125th birth anniversary of legendary artist Jamini Roy with a special exhibition titled ‘Jamini Roy (1887 – 1972): Journey to the Roots’, the staggering range of the artist’s oeuvre is indeed an eye-opener.
Roy was one of the earliest and most significant modernists of 20th century Indian art whose career, spanning nearly six decades, had many significant turning points.
Trained in the British academic style of painting in the early decades of the 20th century, Roy became well known as a skilful portraitist. He received regular commissions after he graduated from the Government Art School in what is now Kolkata in 1916.
However, the growing surge of the nationalist movement prompted all kinds of experiments in literature and the arts.
In visual arts, the experiments were clearly manifested with the founding of the Bengal School by Abanindranath Tagore, rejecting European naturalism and the use of oil as a medium in visual arts.
Roy also rejected the style he had mastered during his academic training and from the early 1920s searched for forms that stirred the innermost recesses of his being.
He sought inspiration from sources as diverse as East Asian calligraphy, terracotta temple friezes, objects from folk art and craft traditions and the like. From 1920 onwards, Roy brought a joy and élan to the representation of village scenes and people, reflecting the innocence and romanticism of his childhood upbringing in a rural environment.
For the next few years, Roy did a suite of paintings featuring Santhal women. These sensuously painted women were engaged in their daily chores in their village settings of the time. From the mid-1920s, his images were executed with sweeping, calligraphic lines showing the artist’s strong control over the brush in his creations.
Colour was leached out of the paintings resulting in series of monochromatic pictures that hinted at inspiration from both East Asian painting styles and Kalighat pats. The images were drawn from everyday life — mother and child figures, women, Bauls and so on.
By the end of 1920s Roy turned for inspiration towards the folk art and craft traditions of his own district. He painted ordinary rural people, scenes from Krishna Leela, scenes from the epics, icons from the folk cults of the region, along with witty representations of animals.
And yet Roy’s methods were not those of the folk artist. There was no spontaneous naivéte in his visualisation. He made meticulous and detailed drawings of his images.
Another feature to be noted in Jamini Roy’s modernism was the use of bold, vibrant, dazzling colours that negated the naturalistic colour palette.
It is interesting that till the 1930s, along with his folk-style paintings, the artist also continued to paint portraits with impressionist and even pointillist brushstrokes in his works.
The medium in the later years was however tempera. Amazingly, he also made wonderful copies of the European masters.
Obviously, these were tools for honing the artist’s visual language.
In the end, however, Roy’s journey to his roots will be remembered by the vigour and volume of his forms, the extraordinary boldness and versatility of his lines and the vibrancy of his colours.
(Poonam Goel is a freelance journalist who contributes articles on visual arts for unboxedwriters.com)