Ganesh Pyne: Looking Back in Retrospect

Speaker: Nandini Ghosh

September 6, 2013 | 6.30 pm
Auditorium, National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai

As an artist linguistically poised on the threshold between tradition and modernity, Ganesh Pyne was symptomatic of the 1970s modernist developments in Indian painting; however, his personal expression was also marked by the difference of individual distinction.

Through their stylistic and thematic concerns, his paintings become an index to the characteristic features of the art of the period. They reflect a keen consciousness of time, culture, ambience, socio-political conditions and individual identity while situating the individual within the immediate locale of one’s existence.

Ganesh Pyne began from a stylistic proximity and lineage of the Bengal School tradition, exactly at a moment when it was felt infinitely more exciting by many of his contemporaries to align with purely Western modernist trends in an effort to keep pace with the global linguistic transformations. The invoking of the European modern aimed at international standards that would discard the romanticized notion – and myth – of past glory, that characterized the art of
the early modernists, for whom it had signified steps towards self-definition and thereby nation building.

This presentation seeks to address the oeuvre of the artist seen from this regenerative perspective within personal stylistic proclivities, and to review how the Bengal School style could shed its garb of mannerism, and proceed through stages of gradual transformation in the hands of an artist like Ganesh Pyne, so as to emerge as an expressive, re-defined vehicle for communicating contemporary modernist sensibilities.

Nandini Ghosh is an art historian and writer based in Shantiniketan. She holds a PhD in History of Art from MS University, Baroda. While her Master’s level dissertation was based on the theme ‘Tradition of Myth in Indian Modern: Contemporary Indian Painting’, her doctoral thesis was titled ‘Tracing the Regional Modern: Emerging Art Trends in Bengal since 1970’s’. She has taught art history at several institutions and her articles have appeared in prominent art journals in India.