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Nikhil Biswas' artistic career was cut tragically short, at a pivotal point in the shaping of contemporary art history in India . He was a passionate artist, who worked swiftly and fervently, expressing his creativity...
Nikhil Biswas' artistic career was cut tragically short, at a pivotal point in the shaping of contemporary art history in India . He was a passionate artist, who worked swiftly and fervently, expressing his creativity in an idiom as innovative as it was personal. His meteoric passage across India 's art firmament – brilliant and brief – ended when he died at Sri Lanka in 1966. But his name remains indelibly etched in the glorious saga of Bengal art.
Following his first solo show in 1953, Nikhil Biswas forged a new group called the Calcutta Painters, together with young contemporaries like Prakash Karmakar and Bijon Chowdhury. Jogen Chowdhury, Rabin Mandal and Gopal Sanyal are other noted members of the Calcutta Painters. Biswas was also a member of the present Society of Contemporary Artists in Calcutta .
Eminent art colleague Shyamal Dutta Ray describes his years spent with Biswas at Art College and thereafter, “A student of 1 st Year with such matured ideas and skill created some confusion among our teachers…Nikhil was quite obstinate and refused to accept the stereotyped regular instruction … In 1951, seven of us blacklisted students of Art College formed a group with Nikhil in the lead. It was the ‘Chitranshu' Group and we held exhibitions in Chowringhee Terrace. Chitranshu is the name of the seven horses in the chariot of the Sun, the most vigorous and energetic horse being Nikhil Biswas … his speed of work astonished us … in a span of only 17 years he painted a huge mass of paintings and drawings … but Jesus crucified, a vigorous bull or the outburst of a lone horse, seemed to be his very own expression … of protest … With a very short life of only 36 years he shook the very roots of our artistic existence … posterity will write his name in history…”
Both the themes and style of Biswas' works reflect the temper of the turbulent conflict-racked period immediately before and after India 's independence. They conceptualize and articulate “a profound sense of post-colonial social and psychological tension and turmoil in manners”, through distorted representations of forms and figures.
Biswas used lines with power and expressiveness, strongly delineating, bending and twisting them to his purpose. Color effects, often vividly whorled and complexly structured were used with similar emotion – even when his palette comprised soft hues only. Emotive issues – the Bengal famine, the seething cross-border ‘Migration' of stripped, scrambling humanity after the trauma of India's Partition, and the human upheavals triggered by the India-China War of 1961, were among his more typical themes. But representation of the day to day lives and aspects of men and animals – particularly horses, his symbols of strength and virility – exude a similar stormy power.
His preoccupations and inferences on art and artistic purpose are best summed up in his own words. “Lonely as I am in this wide world, I see how this spirit of loneliness has infected the mood of our modern artists and colored their work … I should like to dissect everything connected with a ‘human being' – his blood and muscle, his morbidity and sexuality. But this effort sometimes leads me to a point of no return, where dehumanization becomes the natural order of things. Still I find no release from this painful urge to search…”
BIODATA
Nikhil Biswas' artistic career was cut tragically short, at a pivotal point in the shaping of contemporary art history in India . He was a passionate artist, who worked swiftly and fervently, expressing his creativity in an idiom as innovative as it was personal. His meteoric passage across India 's art firmament – brilliant and brief – ended when he died at Sri Lanka in 1966. But his name remains indelibly etched in the glorious saga of Bengal art.
Following his first solo show in 1953, Nikhil Biswas forged a new group called the Calcutta Painters, together with young contemporaries like Prakash Karmakar and Bijon Chowdhury. Jogen Chowdhury, Rabin Mandal and Gopal Sanyal are other noted members of the Calcutta Painters. Biswas was also a member of the present Society of Contemporary Artists in Calcutta .
Eminent art colleague Shyamal Dutta Ray describes his years spent with Biswas at Art College and thereafter, “A student of 1 st Year with such matured ideas and skill created some confusion among our teachers…Nikhil was quite obstinate and refused to accept the stereotyped regular instruction … In 1951, seven of us blacklisted students of Art College formed a group with Nikhil in the lead. It was the ‘Chitranshu' Group and we held exhibitions in Chowringhee Terrace. Chitranshu is the name of the seven horses in the chariot of the Sun, the most vigorous and energetic horse being Nikhil Biswas … his speed of work astonished us … in a span of only 17 years he painted a huge mass of paintings and drawings … but Jesus crucified, a vigorous bull or the outburst of a lone horse, seemed to be his very own expression … of protest … With a very short life of only 36 years he shook the very roots of our artistic existence … posterity will write his name in history…”
Both the themes and style of Biswas' works reflect the temper of the turbulent conflict-racked period immediately before and after India 's independence. They conceptualize and articulate “a profound sense of post-colonial social and psychological tension and turmoil in manners”, through distorted representations of forms and figures.
Biswas used lines with power and expressiveness, strongly delineating, bending and twisting them to his purpose. Color effects, often vividly whorled and complexly structured were used with similar emotion – even when his palette comprised soft hues only. Emotive issues – the Bengal famine, the seething cross-border ‘Migration' of stripped, scrambling humanity after the trauma of India's Partition, and the human upheavals triggered by the India-China War of 1961, were among his more typical themes. But representation of the day to day lives and aspects of men and animals – particularly horses, his symbols of strength and virility – exude a similar stormy power.
His preoccupations and inferences on art and artistic purpose are best summed up in his own words. “Lonely as I am in this wide world, I see how this spirit of loneliness has infected the mood of our modern artists and colored their work … I should like to dissect everything connected with a ‘human being' – his blood and muscle, his morbidity and sexuality. But this effort sometimes leads me to a point of no return, where dehumanization becomes the natural order of things. Still I find no release from this painful urge to search…”