Lalit Kala Akademi-sponsored National Exhibition arouses reactions of scornful asperity

Winner's Posthumous and (inset) Broota (left) Reverie and (inset) Bindra: Vitriol and confrontation behind the scenesThere were phoney Husains and pseudo Akbar Padamsees. There were canvases that seemed to have sprung straight out of the pages of American art catalogues. There was sculpture of staggering commonness and vulgarity, but for the first time felt some, younger Indian artists had been given a forum.From neo-realist flights of fancy to commercialised '60s pop, few western styles were left unplagiarised or few foreign stylists gone unimiiated. As the two-week-long exposition of contemporary Indian art - the National Exhibition - came to a close last fortnight, there was plenty of vitriol being flung on the few protagonists left. "This isn't contemporary Indian art." sneered one critic, "it's contemporary hand-me-down art."Stretching through three floors of New Delhi's Rabindra Bhavan and running to 307 exhibits, the Lalit Kala Akademi-sponsored annual art fate aroused reactions of scornful asperity and conceited superiority. "It's a very poor show," snapped painter Krishen Khanna, "one of the poorest I've seen. Some of the best young talents have been left out, especially those whose work has been selected for the forthcoming triennale. How is it that work that is considered fit to be exhibited at an international show, has been rejected for the National Exhibition?" Retorted painter Rameshwar Broota whose sprawling canvases in sinister shades of grey were given one of the 10 cash awards of Rs 5,000: "Why don't these older painters have the guts to compete with younger artists? That will expose them. It will show the world how good or bad these big dadas are."It was a true show of dadagiri, artists' style. The confrontation behind the show lay not only between dadas big and small, those whose work was selected and those who were rejected, but also in the allegedly biased distribution of prizes. Six of the 10 award-winners are Delhi-based artists, and at least four are connected with Triveni Kala Sangam, a Delhi art and culture school with a large art department headed by Rameshwar Broota. Sanjog II Trivedi and Pilgritns by Kapur : Repeating an annual ritualSaid painter Manu Parekh, whose works were rejected by the three-member selection board: "What's happened in their mode of selection this time, has never happened before. All the awards are connected - it's an obvious case of partiality by Keshav Malik who favours the Triveni group. I had no idea that he was capable of this. He's exposed himself completely by his actions."Allegations: Malik, "a long-standing art critic who also edits the Sahitya Kala Akademi's literary journal in English was but one of the three jurors who made the selection, the other two being K.V. Haridasan, a Kerala professor of art and Mahendra Pandya, head of the Department of Sculpture, at the M.S. University of Baroda. One of Pandya's prize pupils, Lalita Katt, has been given a sculpture award for her extraordinary exhibit called Growth II, a fungic mass that has bubbling aluminium clinging to black marble. Though it remains one of the few original pieces of sculpture on display, the fact that Katt was trained under Pandya in Baroda has intensified the allegations of a professor favouring his best pupil. One antagonist goes so far as to claim that the three judges simply divided the awards among their favourite proteges.Such nepotistic intentions are vehemently denied by the mild-mannered Malik who went through die 2,000 exhibits submitted for selection from all over the country. "'We simply looked at the quality of work, not the names." he says in defence of the work of major artists such as Bikash Bhattacharjee, Jogen Choudhury and Manu Parekh being turned down. "Frankly, I didn't even know Bikash's work was in - we made the selection strictly on merit and didn't consider reputations or names at all." Since both Parekh and Bhattacharjee are among the 55 Indian artists nominated for participation in the forthcoming Fifth Triennale-India to be held in February 1982, their omission from the National Exhibition has widened the schism in the artistic camps. Says Malik, in explanation of the difference between the two exhibitions: "The selection for the Triennale is being made not by an inspection of work but by relaying on the established reputation and prominence of the artist." Richari Bartholomew, a former art critic for The Times of India, who is now secretary of the Akademi and responsible for organising the Triennale confirms this but refrains from entering the controversy.Younger artists whose work is shown feel that the entire outcry has been rigged by older, established names who think their position is threatened. Says Vasundhara Tiwari whose two works, in stark black and white emphasising hands as the fulcrum of the human form won much admiration at the show: "Not all the top artists need necessarily produce good work. Art isn't a monopoly - all these allegations are highly unfair." Tiwari who is also part of the Triveni group, defends the allegation of a Triveni bias by saying that at the National Exhibition in 1976 four out of the seven awards went to Baroda-based artists. Says Broota in further defence: "People come to Triveni to work from all over the country - many of them are deserving with distinctive styles and influences. They're not kids dabbling with paintbrushes but dedicated artists."Wide Representation: "The real tragedy of the situation," says one critic, "is that such a continuing squabble may drown the really dedicated among younger artists, even if they are no more than a handful."Generally critics expressed some pleasure at the wide representation of Indian art even if they harped over the serious omissions of well-known names. Said critic Aman Nath: "Certainly, standards have gone up in comparison to what used to get through in the past." Critic S.A. Krishnan of The Statesman disagreed. The selection, he said for an exhibition so large was "loose, unequal and unimpressive, not only within itself, but what is happening in the country at large." The point he made about the National Exhibition's deteriorating standard was that, since its institution in 1955 the number of group and individual shows in cities have risen so appreciably - over 200 a year in Delhi alone - that the best talent is dispersed. "The National Exhibition must assume selective character, what we need is a judicious selection of a smaller number of artists, picked out by virtue of their experience and sustained significance, and with a good body of work from each."The looseness and inequality was clearly evident in the sadly imitative paths pursued by Indian artists. It wasn't just carbon copies of top-selling Indian painters that abounded but outdated, out-of-proportion and out-of-context derivations of American artists from Frank Stella to Andy Warhol to the extent of using alien metaphors. Where Indian symbolism was applied, it often possessed all the subtlety of a slap in the face. One offering in mixed-media, for example, was a send-up of Madhubani art, with a male and female figure floating in folksy tradition among floral motifs, and inscribed in the middle were the first two lines of a popular Hindi film song. Was it tongue-in-cheek pastiche or an argument equating Folk Art vs Pop Art? Such questions were more ingeniously answered by Shantiniketan artist K. G. Subramanyan - one of the seven artists invited to participate in the show - who displayed a triptych of modern glass paintings, folksy male, female and animal forms on gold-tinted glass in garish frames that parodied as much the kitsch quality of traditional south Indian glass paintings as it did their faddist rediscovery in fashionable drawing-rooms.Such diversions aside, there were sprinkled here and there and works that stood head and shoulders above the rest. Their simplicity, honesty and visual directness - as in Suneela Bindra's boldly whimsical pen-and-ink drawing that won an award came through in shining contrast to the fussiness and the fakery that pervaded 'the show. Similarly, Madhoor Kapur's vividly realistic Pilgrims an almost photographic close-up of villagers at the desert fair of Pushkar showed the artist's new phase. But perhaps the best canvas of the lot won praise unanimously, and also an award. It was K. Khosa's Construction I, a deceptively simple abstract that recorded the complex flow of a single surface. Where, in the end, did the show take the hurried viewer? Did it offer a broad and truly representative picture of goings-on in the art camps, studios and art schools of the country? Not really, seemed to be the general impressions as the bickerings among the artists themselves subsided to gather fuel for the next blow-up session. There was unanimous praise for the handful of outstanding works that made the grade. But the National Exhibition was neither really national nor really revealing of the state of contemporary Indian art. It was as a daily newspaper blandly put it, merely the repetition of an annual ritual.Published By: AtMigration Published On: Nov 21, 2013 13:10 IST--- ENDS ---

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Lalit Kala Akademi-sponsored National Exhibition arouses reactions of scornful asperity

As the two-week-long exposition of contemporary Indian art - the National Exhibition - came to a close last fortnight, there was plenty of vitriol being flung on the few protagonists left.

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