Flipping through
RANA SIDDIQUI
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A coffee-table book on Bikash Bhattacharjee hits the stands.
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The book is an open-ended account of Bikash's works from 1957 to 2000.
PHOTO: S. SUBRAMANIUM
MASTERSTROKE Satish Gujral and Karan Singh release the book. Bikash Bhattacharjee's wife Parbati and author Manasij Majumdar look on.
When wheelchair-bound artist Bikash Bhattacharjee saw the dummy copy of "Close to Events: Works of Bikash Bhattacharjee" tears rolled down his cheeks. This was a coffee-table book on him by his favourite art writer Manasjit Majumdar. He said to Bikash D. Niyogi of Niyogi Books who took it to him. "Shob boi to more jabar paure ei publish hoi" (Most books get published after the subject is dead).
As if he knew it. Barely three months later, on December 18, 2006, Bhattacharjee, 65, breathed his last after a month-long battle for life. The book, "an open-ended account of his works from 1957 to 2000" as Majumdar puts it, was launched this week in New Delhi.
Karan Singh and Satish Gujral released the book in the presence of Parbati Bhattacharjee, the artist's wife and daughter Balaka, also a painter. Singh brought a "surprise" in the event by showing his own portrait that Bhattacharjee made in 1978. He remarked, "Bikash is my all-time favourite painter who could produce sharp images like Salvador Dali as also disturb us with his grotesque surrealism."
Gujral was humbled. "When Mexico's stalwart painter José Clemente Orozco died in 1949, I was there. When his body was carried in a funeral procession, all roads were made clear. New York Times wrote in its editorial `Great is that country in which an artist is considered great... ' Today, as a humble friend of Bikash, I feel India has also come to respect its great artists," he said.Running into 250 pages, the book, priced at Rs.2000, roughly spans from 1957 to 1999. It is replete with paintings ranging from portraits that he was most famous for, every day life on the streets of Calcutta, his angst on the Partition, his `dolls' series indicative of human depravation, the `tout' series and much more.
The author says
Recalls Majumdar, whose credentials have been proved through his earlier books on stalwarts like Sakti Burman and Sunil Das, "I met Bikash in 1979 when I had gone to interview him for Calcutta Doordarshan. I had been closely following his works. I don't know why he always preferred me over other writers. All his works are extremely metaphorical and allegorical in nature. All his creations were rooted in his experience. So much had realism overpowered him that he couldn't stick to abstraction that he tried in the early 1960s. He was one-year-old when his father died. He faced a lot of hardships and was witness to terrible Bengal migration, Partition and the pathetic lives of the poor in Calcutta. Few know that his favourite painter was Andrew White and favourite writer Francis Bacon."
"Before his death, I read out two chapters to him. He couldn't speak but told me through Parbati that he liked them. When he was in the hospital, he said to me that once he comes back from there, he would paint his experiences of the hospital."
The art lovers would never get to see that.
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