Sailoz Mookherjea: A forgotten genius

Sailoz Mookherjea is a member of an exclusive club of nine painters — Raja Ravi Varma, Amrita Sher-Gil, Jamini Roy, Rabindranath Tagore among them — whose works are designated by law as 'national treasures', i.e, they cannot be taken out of the country.

In 1937-38, he went to Europe to acquaint himself with the developments in modern art in the continent — the first of many Indian artists (FN Souza and SH Raza, for instance) who traced the same journey in subsequent decades. There he met Henri Matisse, a visible influence on his work. Mookherjea worked in oil in a fluid, expressionist manner, a rare thing because most of the artists of his time were using water-colour or when working with oil, making realistic paintings in a style that was already outdated in Europe. It is for this reason that critics deem Mookherjea one of India's earliest and most important 'modernist' artists, who synthesized European style with that Indian miniatures to depict the reality of the India around him.

More significant is how influential Mookherjea was as a teacher and mentor, shaping the sensibilities of an entire generation of young artists, among them Ram Kumar, J Swaminathan, Arpita and Paramjeet Singh.

So why is it that Mookherjea is largely forgotten by the art world today?

The ongoing exhibition at Dhoomimal Art Gallery in the capital is his first solo in recent memory — his works appear but rarely even in group shows. Even the present show is a selection of his works from the family collection of the galleryist Mohit Jain whose grandfather Ram Babu was Mookherjea's original patron, supporting and promoting him, showing his work, even providing him a place to stay in the final months of his life. Though fairly representative of his range as an artist — there are several early tempera paintings done when he was in Calcutta (Kolkata), besides the landscapes and village scenes he's identified with, a few rare large works, and a still life - the exhibition seems to have been hurriedly put together with little autobiographical or other contextual detail.

Auctions, one way to measure an artist's standing, too don't reflect Mookherjea's worth — his paintings come up for sale very rarely and when they do, are sold for very moderate sums. The highest price he's ever fetched is Rs 10 lakh at a Saffronart sale in 2015, for a beautiful late work done in the 'scratch' style that he is famous for.

Gopi Gajwani, senior Delhi-based artist who was a student of Mookherjea at Delhi Polytechnic between '54 and '59, speaks of how much he is saddened by how young students, even at the Delhi College of Art (Delhi Polytechnic it was called then) where he taught, don't know of his genius. "He lacks a champion," he says, unlike others like Husain or Tyeb Mehta who are the toast of the art world today. Paramjeet Singh, another students, says, "In Delhi, the tradition of projecting artists did not develop like in Bengal or Bombay [Mumbai]. Besides, modern art was so new at the time, right after independence. There were few critics, no one writing about art."

What emerges in the reminiscences of his students, many of whom spoke at the show's opening, is of an eccentric genius, a life of poverty and loneliness, marred by alcohol addiction. Those who knew him wrote unabashedly about it. Here's J Swaminathan, an acolyte, writing in his journal: "Sailoz babu was quite a character... he was a familiar sight at Connaught Circus and every dilliwala knew him as the crazy artist. Those were the days when there was no dearth of public bars in Delhi. Sailoz babu would spend his time going into and emerging out of these bars around Connaught Circus, gazing at the dazzling bloom of Gulmohar trees in the park." in a moving essay written shortly after his death, Richard Bartholomew, who knew him briefly, wrote about how, "...for Sailoz the past and the future bubbled like the soda in his whisky". "You see, he had to sell his paintings quickly for his drinking," says

Partha Chatterjee, a Delhi-based art writer whose book on Sailoz will be out soon, implying that as a result they went to unscrupulous buyers.

Chatterjee offers another reason for Mookherjea's obscurity — that most of his best works are abroad now. "Half of them went out in the course of his lifetime, but the others were smuggled out. A majority of his works are small, many of them on paper, and so easier to roll up and take abroad as hand baggage. In India, the NGMA has a few, while Mohit and Uday Jain (the current promoters of Dhoomimal) and Kumar Gallery have a few. In Kolkata, Ranu Mukherjee [a famous art patron] had some," says Chatterjee who has been wanting to make a film on the painter for the last 30 years, but hasn't found anyone to back his project. "Besides, the art market today is controlled by the big auction houses. They are driven by profits alone and will not make a special effort to promote a forgotten artist."