JP Singhal worked on 2,700 paintings in an era when computers and television were not around, says Gargi Gupta
There's a contradiction at the heart of modern art - on the one hand is "high" art which, though it looks simplistic and flies against our ideas of beauty, gets sold for millions; on the other is "popular" art or "kitsch" which is often more conventionally "beautiful", made with great skill, but gets sold for a pittance.
Thus, the world knows little about JP Singhal, whose works (limited edition, high-quality art prints) are currently being sold online on Saffronart. But though the name is unknown, the artworks themselves - beautiful, idyllic, hyper-real depictions of gods and goddesses, tribal women, village scenes - will seem only too familiar. After all, most of us have grown up looking at these images, or those made in a similar style, on calendars.
For Singhal was one of India's most prolific calendar artists, a genre much devalued as art, unless one is talking Raja Ravi Varma. In his lifetime — Singhal died last year at the age of 80 — he had created 2,700 paintings over a career spanning 35 years, of which around 80 crore reproductions were made.
"Those were the days, before TV, when calendars were the principal mode of advertisement and my father's paintings were used in calendars for companies like Parle, Britannia, Asian Paints, Bajaj, and Advani-Oerlikon," says Dinesh Singhal, the artist's son. Besides the Saffronart sale, the Singhal Foundation will also be holding exhibitions of his works - the first at Mumbai's JJ School of Art in October, followed by one at Jehangir Art Gallery in December. Incidentally, it was at Jehangir where Singhal had his first, and last, exhibition in 2012, at the grand old age of 78.
What's remarkable is that Singhal was self-taught. Born in Meerut in 1934, Singhal's career took off after Hindi magazine Dharmayug used his paintings as illustration. The move to Mumbai happened in 1959 and work flowed until the 1990s, when TV, photoshop and digital technology made artists such as Singhal largely redundant.
But there's something remarkable about Singhal's career — his association with films, especially with the way stars were portrayed. Singhal's tryst with cinema began when Raj Kapoor asked him to style Zeenat Aman, who would appear in a film he was making called Satyam Shivam Sundaram, in the image of one of his calendar paintings of a young, scantily-clad tribal girl. After all, as Pritish Nandy commented in the catalogue for Singhal's exhibition: "No one captured feminine sensuality as he did."
That led, as it were, to a career extension as Singhal found himself greatly in demand to "style" stars, or design publicity material for films. For the mahurat (first) shot of Sanjay Dutt's debut film Rocky, Singhal did an entire photo shoot with the lead pair and put up around a hundred of these in a kind of "art gallery".
Did being labelled as "kitsch" ever bother Singhal? "Not really," says his son. "My father was a humble man. It's only in the 1990s, when he met MF Husain while working on his films Gajagamini and Meenakshi, that he felt he could do more."
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