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| Rushdie by Khakhar |
The
London Guardian has given a bad
review of Bhupen Khakhar’s (1935-2003) exhibition (You can’t please all at Tate Modern), and it has expectedly given heartburns to the art fraternity in India.
A stray bad review by an art critic will not make or destroy the monumental reputation
that Bhupen Khakhar justifiably enjoys.
I’m
reading Anton Joseph, Salman Rushdie’s
memoir of his harrowing days in the hiding from the Iranian fatwa following the
publication of the Satanic Verses.
Rushdie
and Khakhar shared close bonds, and Khakhar also features as a character in The Moor’s Last Sigh. Although they were
friends, and even if we agree that the author’s opinion about the painter’s
greatness would be biased, the memoir gives a keen insight into Khakhar’s
significance to Indian art.
Rushdie
says, “Finding an Indian idiom that was neither folkloric nor derivative had
not been easy, and Bhupen had been one of the first to succeed, looking at the
street art of India, the movie posters, the painted shop fronts, and at the
figurative and narrative traditions of Indian painting, and creating out of
that visual environment an oeuvre of idiosyncrasy, originality and wit.”
Read
the passage from the book for a better understanding of Khakhar, and Rushdie’s endearing
narrative skills.
The BBC made a documentary about The Moor’s Last Sigh and commissioned
his friend the Indian painter Bhupen Khakhar to paint his portrait for the
film. It was a novel about his painters and painting and his friendships with a
generation of gifted Indian artists – with Bhupen himself above all – had allowed
him to think of writing it. They had first met in the early 1980s and each of
them had at once seen himself in the other and they had quickly become friends.
Soon after their first meeting he went to Bhupen’s show at the Kasmin Knoedler
gallery in London. In his pocket was a check (cheque) for a story he had just
sold to The Atlantic Monthly. At the
show he fell in love with Bhupen’s Second
Class Railway Compartment and when he discovered that the price tag was
exactly the same as the figure on the check in his pocket (Indian art was
cheaper then) he had happily turned his story into his friend’s painting, and
it had remained one of his most prized possessions ever since. It was hard for
contemporary Indian artists to escape the influence of the West (in an earlier
generation M. F. Husain’s famous horses had leaped straight out of Picasso’s Guernica, and the work of many of the
other big names – Souza, Raza, Gaitonde – was too deeply indebted for his
liking to modernism and Western developments in the abstraction). Finding an
Indian idiom that was neither folkloric nor derivative had not been easy, and
Bhupen had been one of the first to succeed, looking at the street art of
India, the movie posters, the painted shop fronts, and at the figurative and
narrative traditions of Indian painting, and creating out of that visual
environment an oeuvre of idiosyncrasy, originality and wit.
At the heart of The Moor’s Last Sigh was the idea of the palimpsest, a picture
concealed beneath another picture, a world hidden beneath another world. Before
he was born his parents had hired a young Bombay painter to decorate his future
nursery with fairy-tale and cartoon animals and the impoverished artist Krishen
Khanna had accepted the commission. He had also painted a portrait of the
unborn Salman’s beautiful young mother, Negin, but her husband, Anis, hadn’t
like it and refused to buy it. Khanna stored his rejected canvas at his friend
Husain’s studio and one day Husain painted a picture on his own over it, and
sold it. So somewhere in Bombay there was a portrait of Negin Rushdie by
Krishen, who of course, grew up to be one of the leading artists of his
generation, concealed beneath a picture by Husain. Krishen said, “Husain knows
where every picture of his has ended up, but won’t say.” The BBC tried to get
him to say, ut the old man angrily tapped his cane on the floor and denied that
the story was true. “Of course it’s true,” Krishen said. “He’s just worried
that you want to destroy his painting to find your mother’s portrait, and he’s
offended that you’re looking for my picture and you don’t care about his.” In
the end he had come to think that the portrait was more evocative lost than
found – lost, it was a beautiful mystery; found, it might have proved that Anis
Rushdie’s artistic judgement had been correct, and that then apprentice Khanna
hadn’t done a very good job – and he called off the search.
He sat for Bhupen in a studio in Edwardes
Square, Kensington, and told him the story of the lost picture. Bhupen giggled
delightedly and worked away. His portrait was being painted hi profile in the
tradition of Indian court portraits, and like a good nawab he wore a
see-through shirt, only his, painted by Bhupen, looked more like nylon than
sheer cotton. Bhupen began drawing in a single movement, a charcoal profile
that caught an exact likeness with effortless skill. The painting that covered
this single charcoal line looked in some ways less like its subject and more
like the character of Moor Zogoiby in the novel. “It’s a painting of you both,”
Bhupen said. “You as the Moor and the Moor as you.” So there was a lost portrait
beneath this portrait too.
The completed painting was eventually
acquired by the National Portrait Gallery, and Bhupen became the first Indian artist
to have a work hanging there. Bhupen died on August 6, 2003, on the same day as
Negin Rushdie. There was no escape from coincidence, though the meaning of such
synchronicity remained elusive. He lost a friend and a mother on the same day.
That was meaning enough.
Read
the Jonathan Jones’s review in The Guardian here: Mumbai’s answer to Beryl Cook
Read
Amit Chaudhuri’s essay on Bhupen Khakhar also in The Guardian here: Bombay
dreams: how painter Bhupen Khakhar captured the city spirit
Read
Indian art fraternity’s reaction to Jones’s negative review here: Indian
Artists Respond to Review Mocking Bhupen Khakhar Show at Tate
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