Secular Deities, Enchanted Plants: the art of Mrinalini Mukherjee

My essay on the late sculptor Mrinalini Mukherjee, published in the newly launched website The Wire.



In one of AS Byatt’s Matisse Stories (1995), a self-declared “artistic family” is stunned to discover that their silent, reliable, long-time housekeeper Mrs. Brown has been making more with their cast-off clothes than the patchwork tea-cosies they grudgingly display. The person most in shock is Robin, serious artist and irritable man of the house, whose repetitive paintings of single objects – ‘problems of colour’, he calls them – are summarily rejected by a fashionable London gallerist. In favour of Mrs. Brown’s dazzling cavern of creatures, knitted and stitched from scraps of wool and cloth.

Mrinalini Mukherjee was no Mrs. Brown. She was the only daughter of the artists Benode Bihari and Leela Mukherjee, and trained in fine arts at Baroda’s MS University. Today, her work is part of the public collections at Bharat Bhavan and Lalit Kala Akademi, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Tate Modern in London–and international interest is only getting stronger. But as the artist Nilima Sheikh, Mukherjee’s close friend and contemporary, points out, “For a very long time, the sculpture world, especially in Delhi and Baroda, didn’t accept her as a sculptor, because ‘woh toh kucch craft mein kar rahi hai‘. But she kept improvising, and pushing the boundaries. Her work became much more relevant [than theirs].”

Peter Nagy, curator of the Mukherjee retrospective at the National Gallery of Modern Art that opened on 27 January 2015, a week before her unexpected death, goes further. “She got her final revenge,” he chuckles. “Because all those men chiselling away at their chunks of marble in Garhi studio, who pooh-poohed her – very few have gone anywhere, really. In terms of scale, her work just kicks sand in their faces.”

Female, not feminine

Walking into ‘Transfigurations’, as the show at the NGMA is titled, there can be not the slightest doubt that one is in the presence of a brilliantly assured artist. The largest pieces here are the hemp-fibre sculptures that were Mukherjee’s signature for a quarter century, from the early 70s to the mid-90s. The painstaking knotted construction and fluid organic forms may have been responsible for that early, wounding dismissal of this work as ‘craft’, but what leaps out at you is Mukherjee’s ability to turn her malleable, ‘female’ material into stable, imposing, often monumental forms. Frequently, these also display a powerful sense of the sexual.

Close to the entrance, for instance, we are met by ‘Pushp’ (1993) and ‘Adi Pushp’ (1991), which despite their names, belie any idea of the floral as we usually think of it: pretty, summery, sweet-smelling. ‘Adi Pushp’, ‘the first flower’, in particular, is a marvellous evocation of organic growth, the tubular black forms at its centre unfurling into impressive red and brown ‘petals’. Nature in Mukherjee’s conception is no mild, tameable thing. Yet what also emerges from many of her figures is a harmonious continuum between plant, animal and human form; sometimes with the addition of a superhuman element.

The arresting reds and purples of ‘Aranyani’ (1996) combine the sense of some forest flower writ large with that of a female sexual form, and an enthroned regal figure. The three free-standing figures that make up ‘Vruksha Nata’ (1991-92) appear plant-like at first, with their layered stems and fronds in light brown and lime green. But as one looks at them again, their inescapably humanoid qualities come to the fore: a sad, drooping head, a bent back, what seems like the start of a slow, painful hobble towards the other.

The forest is never far away, and Mukherjee’s forms of divinity are often particular to it. ‘Vanshree’ (1994), woven of yellow and mauve, has what seems undeniably like a face. Her eyes are sunken in, or perhaps hooded, with age, or sleep. Her lips protrude, sulkily. An umbrella above her, she sits grandly upon a golden throne, and may or may not grant you an audience. ‘Van Raja’ (1991-94) is even grander. Placed in a woven alcove arched like a temple is a standing figure, very definitely male, but also animal. Is this a tiger turned god, his golden body made erect, to be worshipped amidst his unruly jungle of green?

Crafting Art

For Mrinalini Mukherjee, refusing the hierarchy of high art and low art came naturally. Seeing craft and art as parallel to each other was part of her artistic legacy, both from her parents, and from her mentor at Baroda, Prof. KG Subramanyan. Subramanyan himself had studied at Shantiniketan, and been Benode Behari Mukherjee’s student. “So there was a sort of lineage going on,” says Sheikh. Shaped by Tagore’s rejection of the colonial aesthetic, Shantiniketan’s teachers and practitioners had long taken interest in Indian art forms and indigenous materials. While primarily a painter, Subramanyan took craft seriously enough to have left his teaching job and joined the All India Handloom Board as a Deputy Director for a couple of years in the 1960s. Later, in 1975-76, he was also elected a member of the World Crafts Council.

But how did Mukherjee arrive at her unusual material? In the late 1960s, says Sheikh, during MS University’s annual Fine Arts Fair, the campus was thrown open to the public. Students would often make “gateways, sculptural forms, design units… to make things more festive.” One of the materials used for these was hemp fibre, and even as an undergraduate, Mukherjee was drawn to the possibilities of the material. So she chose mural design as the option for her MA, and asked Subramanyan whether she could specialise only in hemp in the final year.
Subramanyan himself had worked a little in hemp, but Mukherjee’s conception of the material was very much her own. For one, she was remarkably invested in scale. As early as 1972, she was commissioned to produce a 30-foot fibre sculpture for the DCM pavilion at the Asia 72 trade fair. She then did a 45 X 4 foot one for the Ashoka Hotel, and a 14 X 70 foot mural for the Gandhi Memorial Institute at Mauritius. (The Mauritius work still exists, it has recently been photographed by an art enthusiast, hung on the wall on either side of what appears to be an auditorium stage—sadly somewhat robbed of its original grandeur by large black speakers.)
Her second crucial departure was to make her sculptures freestanding, or at least viewable in the round. Mural design, which she trained in, involves working on walls or ceilings: think Italian frescoes, or the Ajanta caves. But after early works, like the Mauritius one, and another on display here, Water Fall (1975), Mukherjee seems to have consciously abandoned murals.

A couple of other works at NGMA do lean against a wall, like Sitting Deity (1981), whose trunk-like form and playfully disc-shaped ‘stomach’ gesture to the elephant-headed, pot-bellied Ganesh. On the whole, though, there is a clear progression being marked from hemp netting as a ‘decorative’ element—something to enhance the look of an already existing structure, like a doorway or wall—to independent forms with a definite structure, shape, bulk. Mukherjee’s work gave hemp heft, metaphorically and literally.

Material matters

But it wasn’t quite enough. In the 1990s, Mukherjee slowly stopped working with hemp. We don’t quite know why. She had been working in a single material since the beginning of her career. Also, from the mid-70s, she had been aided in the laborious knotting and twisting by a woman she had trained, known as Budhiya. By the 90s, Budhiya was too old to assist her, and the work seemed tedious to do alone. There is something interesting here, about the collective labour demanded by craft.

Whatever the reasons, a chance workshop at the Sanskriti Kendra in Anandgram, followed by an invitation to the renowned European Ceramic Work Centre in Den Bosch, the Netherlands, enabled her to explore ceramics. Almost immediately, she began making larger works than most ceramic artists do. A decade or so later, in the early 2000s, she moved into bronze, perhaps the most traditional material for sculptors. “She chose bronze for its longevity, its stature, its seriousness,” says Nagy, who showed her bronzes at a solo show at Nature Morte in 2013, and had earlier curated her ceramics at Lokayata Gallery in Delhi’s Hauz Khas Village.
Looking at the bronzes, one feels, first and foremost, a sense of loss at the disappearance of the deep reds, forest greens and coal blacks that had made her hemp work so vivid. The ceramics, happily, are a mix of unglazed flesh tones and glazed vermilions and purples. All her work is striking, but to me the hemp sculptures remain the most memorable. I would even say she went from a complex mediation of organic forms (in hemp fibre) to a more simple translation of them (in ceramic and bronze).

Natural, sexual, human

But it is nature that brings her work together. The lovely arrangement of ceramics called ‘Lotus Pond’, Nos. I to VIII, gives us overlapping lotus leaves on the water surface, tubular stems turning into chutes and spongy thalamus-like forms. Several of the glazed ceramics are cabbage-like, with veined leaves. Others are flowers opening slowly to the sun, upturned half-globes erupting into life—and yet preserving a sense of hidden orifices.

That keen eye for the voluptuous complexities of nature also extends to the cast bronzes. Most of these are purely vegetal in inspiration, the pleasure of them arising from making us see naturally-occurring textures and shapes anew: the stippled interior of a calyx, the gleaming smoothness of an outer stem, the single palm frond slowly detaching itself from a trunk. Here, too, you see a scalar progression, from the smaller Natural History series (2003-2004) to the bronzed plant limbs of Palm Scapes (exhibited in 2013), massive pieces whose precise sense of balance once led Peter Nagy to describe them as “only slightly perturbed by gravity”.
Speaking at the inauguration of the NGMA retrospective, with her friend Mrinalini in hospital, Nilima Sheikh spoke of the child ‘Dillu’ growing up between Shantiniketan and Dehradun (she studied at Welham School, where her mother Leela taught art). Both were places where people went to be with nature, where artists lived with flowers. “Flowers were planted and grown in gardens, worn, sung in praise of, painted, worked into shorthand in textile and rangolis.” But that childhood love of plants and flowers was transformed, in the artist’s hands, into something anthropomorphic and awe-inspiring.

Talking about art

Mukherjee rarely spoke of her artistic process, and even less of what her art ‘meant’. “No, she would never explain the themes,” laughs Pankaj Guru, her assistant on the bronzes for the last sixteen years. “She would just come to the studio and say, I want to do this. She dreamed those works.”

“She used to resist interpretations of her work at first, even the gender politics in it,” agrees Sheikh. “Later she came to accept various interpretations, and was helped by it, I’m sure.” But on the whole, Sheikh suggests, Mukherjee prized spontaneity. Like her mother, who sculpted in wood and later in bronze, (and unlike her more famous father), she was averse to theorising. “Her intellect, her judgement, her connoisseurship was unparallelled. But she didn’t intellectualise.” In a world in which visual art seems increasingly dependent on the words through which it is mediated, Mrinalini Mukherjee’s art manages to make you ask the question: are words the only way to think?

The Mrinalini Mukherjee retrospective at the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, continues until May 31, 2015.

If Buildings Could Speak: Art Review

My piece in this week's Open magazine on the spaces Tagore designed, and artist Samit Das' take on them.

Amid the many images in artist Samit Das’ Lalit Kala Akademi exhibition on Rabindranath Tagore and ‘the idea of space’, is a small, roughly-drawn but attractive sketch entitled Billiard Room at Jora Sanko by Abanindranath Tagore, well-known Bengal School artist and Rabindranath’s nephew. Just as you begin to rifle through your memories of visiting the lovely Tagore residence in Kolkata (now a museum), and think that a billiard room seems most incongruous with what you remember, you notice the full caption: Billiard Room at Jora Sanko (Before Swadeshi).

In those two words —‘Before Swadeshi’— is contained not only the answer to the mystery of the missing billiard room, but a crucial clue to why Jora Sanko Thakurbari feels so different from the typical North Calcutta Zamindar bari. There is none of the opulence that the 19th century Calcutta gentleman would have gone in for as a matter of course: no grand Belgian chandeliers, no magnificently carved mirrors, no Renaissance-style marble statues in the garden. There are the large verandahs of the colonial bungalow, but in the dining room, instead of a massive dining table with ornamental high-backed dining chairs, is a quaint C-shaped table, furnished with low benches.

The C-shaped table is emblematic of the kind of domestic innovations that the Tagores seem to have carried out as a family in the early years of the 20th century: a material transformation of their built environment that was intended as a rejection of the colonial aesthetic as well as a simplification of their living arrangements. There was an attempt to actively nurture a sense of community: having a long dining table that turns in on itself means that no two people are ever placed too far away from each other.

This understanding of the integral relationship between built space and cultural production lies at the core of Samit Das’ longstanding interest in Tagorean ideas of architecture, as manifested both in residential spaces and in the educational-cultural buildings created at Santiniketan between 1910 and 1940. Das is himself a product of Santiniketan, having completed a Master’s in Fine Art from Visva Bharati University in 1996. It was during his student days there that he first grew interested in the architectural aspect of Santiniketan and began to photograph it. Since he moved to Delhi in 1996, and especially since 1999, Das has returned to photograph Santiniketan many times, his deep connection with Tagore and his philosophy informing his artistic and academic engagement with the architecture. His black-and-white photographs of Santiniketan and Jora Sanko, together with archival photographs and a few paintings, make up the exhibition at Lalit Kala Akademi.

In another exhibition at Gallery Nature Morte in New Delhi, entitled In Search of Frozen Music, Das has combined photographic material and Tagorean texts with his own handiwork, creating images that move between watercolour painting, printmaking, drawing and collage.

The Lalit Kala Akademi exhibition, though curated in a rather slipshod manner, makes clear how closely Tagore’s architectural vision was bound with his search for a new national aesthetic that he hoped would be locally rooted as well as open to influences from across the Subcontinent and world. The buildings at Santiniketan, designed by Tagore in conjunction with several other important figures like Surendranath Kar and artist Nandalal Bose, incorporate both structural and aesthetic elements from various historical eras of the Subcontinent and world. An L-shaped pillared verandah at Udayan echoes the galleries of Fatehpur Sikri, as do the wooden door panels; elsewhere, there are structures inspired by Mughal jharokhas, and a Buddhist chaitya, or a wooden grill that echoes one at Angkor Vat. On the walls of the Black House (Kalo Bari), where Visva Bharati’s third year students are housed, are bas-reliefs inspired by those of Bharhut and Aihole and the Mattancherry Palace at Cochin, by Indus Valley seals, by Egyptian and Assyrian art. The most striking and consistent influence is that of Japan: from the matting on the walls of Jora Sanko or the Santiniketan library building, to the wooden ceiling supported by a wooden pillar that echoes the architecture of Japanese temples of the Nara period, to the many elegant windows at Udayan: some circular, some rectangular, all subdivided into square panes of glass by graceful metallic lines.

Japanese-style window at Udayan

The window, in general, appears to have been crucial to Tagore’s philosophy of interior design, precisely because it was a link to the exterior world. In image after image, Tagore appears seated by a window, either writing at a table or on a chair, looking out. Fittingly, Das incorporates in the exhibition a fragment in which Tagore writes of the ideal room as being one in which ‘the sky leans cosily against the window’. This desire for intimacy with the outdoors was responsible for Tagore’s rather counterintuitive distaste for large rooms. He wrote in a letter to Rani Mahalonobish: ‘[I]f the room itself is large, then the outside is distanced. It is a spacious room that actually imprisons a human being, because the mind makes itself comfortable in that sizeable space.’

The preoccupation with sky and sunlight appears again in the penchant for jalis and screens instead of full walls, and in the building called Konark, which had 14 levels of rooftop so that at least one room would always receive direct sunlight. Das, following Tagore’s own leanings, gives windows, doors and verandahs priority in his photographs too—focusing now on the dappled light falling through the trees on to the floor, now on the darkness of a room enlivened by the window placed centrestage.

In the second exhibition, however, the link between exterior and interior is no longer emphasised. We rarely see the interior of a room. Instead, Das puts the exterior outline of the buildings into focus, either by creating a watercolour portrait, or by superimposing a ghostly negative of the building onto a dense overlay of archival photographs, textile prints and snatches of text. Often, he pastes onto the canvas coloured photographic cut-outs of architectural details: a cornice here, a fragment of jali there.

There are only two collage-based works here which seem to bring the artist’s preoccupation with historical figures (most often the figure of Rabindranath) into a real dialogue with the idea of space. In the first, a famous photograph of Tagore reclining on a divan, reading, surrounded by boxes and small tables, is effectively hemmed in by Das’ technique, which is to reduce it in scale and surround it with Tagore’s own pen-and-ink doodles, dark bird-like forms that he would create out of the portions of handwritten text he was crossing out on paper. There is a sense here of the creative mind at work, thoughts that loop in on themselves, threatening to hem one in, but which must be resolved right there, on paper.

There is one more work that manages to achieve this balance. The flat roofs and trees above them create the shadowy feel of a summer afternoon in a Jora Sanko verandah, in the recesses of which is a small boy in a kurta—an archival photograph which may or may not be of Tagore, but certainly evokes the child Rabindranath: sickly and protected in body, but with a mind given to flights of fancy. Das’ placement of an architectural fragment in the foreground is what transforms this image: a curving bit of stone which looks, to all intents and purposes, like a bird. The boy is physically anchored to the verandah, but his mind is soaring.

On the whole, though, the emphasis on space that was so refreshing in the Lalit Kala exhibition here seems to have been overtaken by the historic personages who created or inhabited them: the artist Nandalal Bose towers over the Black House of his creation; Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy, the art historian and scholar, appears beside Tagore, hovering over the house called Prantik; Tagore, resplendent in his white beard and flowing robes seems to preside distractedly over his architectural vision, Udayan, with its Fatehpur Sikri-like verandahs. A series of images are devoted to images of Tagore in different phases of his life, superimposed on texts that he himself wrote in Bengali. The last of these evokes Tagore’s own sense of longing for historic time: ‘looking at this I feel as if I am some remnant of the seventh century’. Even in the watercolour images of buildings, which initially seem bereft of people, human figures lurk in corners, marking their ghostly presence. Buildings, in Das’ vision, seem perennially, reverentially beholden to the people who once inhabited them. They are placeholders for the past.

Although Das insists that his interest in the historic associations of these buildings does not preclude paying attention to them in the present, it is impossible not to come away from his exhibition with a rather gloomy sense that nothing has emerged to fill the vast vacuum left by the artistic and intellectual giants who once gave these spaces life.