The last of the moderns

Online auction house Saffronart opened its new gallery space in the capital on Thursday with an exhibition of paintings by Krishen Khanna, a member of India’s most influential modern art collective – the Progressive Artists’ Group. 

On show are 31 new works, all of them recent, executed by the 92-year-old painter in the last five years or so, informs Saffronart co-founder Dinesh Vazirani, and all in black and white, which will surprise those who best know Khanna for his florid red Bandwallas. Surprisingly, given the artist’s advanced years, these aren’t small drawings taken from his sketch-pad – though some of those are included as well – but large works intricately worked out in charcoal or pencil with oil and acrylic. 

Clearly this is an artist whose powers have in no way diminished with age, rather they have expanded, become more fine-honed and taken flight in exciting, new directions.  

Take two of the largest works on show – Untitled, a 6x12ft painting of an elephant and a tiger in mortal combat, and another called Gaja Moksha, which is nearly 8sqft and shows an elephant whose one foot is in the death grip of a crocodile’s jaw. Powerful, both for their size and careful construction, the paintings are remarkable for the way they capture the frenzy of movement through the brisk, yet dense and confident lines. These are new directions for the largely self-taught artist who is best recognised for his keenly felt depictions of the urban underprivileged – construction labourers, bandwallas, dhaba workers, and others. 

Setting aside these two, many of the works at the Saffronart show are reminiscent of themes and images that Khanna has worked on earlier. There are warriors with fierce looking hawks perched on their wrists – a familiar theme with the artist, and an allusion, art critic Gayatri Sinha points out in her essay in the exhibition catalogue, to both Indian miniature painting and Khanna’s childhood memories in Multan. 

The partition of India, which Khanna has traumatic memories of, is another theme he has tackled often in his art. Here it appears in a series of paintings of buffaloes being driven through marshes. One, called Movement to East Punjab 1947, shows a group nearly neck-deep in slush, bundles on their heads, holding likely all their worldly possessions. One could mistake the painting for a happy pastoral scene, except for the sense of disquiet caused by the blurred white, feature-less humans in sharp relief against the pitch dark bulk of the buffaloes. 

Also, Benediction on the Battlefield, a monumental painting of the Pandavas kneeling in front of a dying Bhishma is an emotionally charged moment in the Mahabharata that Khanna has explored in many of his works over the years.

There’s an urbaneness, a geniality to Khanna, that’s as much a part of his art as these weightier themes. It’s evident in the way he’s always dressed dapperly. One sees it also in his paintings such as Captain Dentist Pesikaka, evidently a mean customer with a cigar in one hand and a beer mug in another, and Byebye ‘Miss Emery, Teacher of English’, a crotchety old English spinster, dressed in a frumpy frock. “She was my mother’s teacher, and very strict,” says the artist, cackling with mirth. 

That sense of humour takes a “naughty” turn with a painting inscribed I’m not dotty. And this aint Bindu, which is an arrangement of concentric circles, a la SH Raza, but in chiaroscuro, with one of Khanna’s trademark bandwallas in the centre. The artist laughs. “It was my little joke with Raza, you know.” he says, somewhat reflectively, of his long-time friend and associate who died earlier this year.