EYE CATCHERS
Chitrakar: The Artist; Benodebehari Mukherjee, Translated by K.G. Subramanyan, Seagull Books, Rs. 550.
Benodebehari Mukherjee is one of the most influential and highly regarded artists in the history of modern Indian art. From the time he started teaching in Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan, in 1929, he was an important influence on a new generation of artists and the paintings and murals that he did between 1936 and 1957 underlined his position as an important figure on the modern Indian art scene. All the four pieces in Chitrakar: The Artist were written after he lost his eyesight in the summer of 1957.
K.G. Subramanyan, Mukherjee's student and now a major figure on the contemporary Indian art scene has translated Chitrakar in a sensitive and empathetic manner.
Moving Focus: Essays on Indian Art; K.G. Subramanyan, Seagull Books, Rs. 450.
Written between the early 1960s and the mid-1970s, these collected articles and lectures reflect on some of the major concerns of the practising artist and scholar of modern Indian art: tradition and modernism, the question of the image, the use of art criticism. They deal with the focal changes taking place in the contemporary art situation — a period of great significance in terms of cultural development just about a decade and a half after India's independence — and seek to put them in perspective. K.G. Subramanyan's analytical essays remain as relevant and useful today as they were when this collection first appeared in the late 1970s.
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