Artist Manickam Senathipathi, among the last masters of the Madras Art Movement, passes away

A tribute to artist Manickam Senathipathi (1939-2025), past president of the Cholamandal Artists Village, who passed away on May 11

The many worlds of Manickam Senathipathi’s artistic journey came to a profoundly moving trajectory in the last canvas he painted at the Artists Village of Cholamandal on Saturday, May 10, 2025.

He called it ‘Christ’, symbolising perhaps the recent elevation of a new Pope to the highest pastoral seat of the Catholic Church. The imagery is bathed in the celestial blue of crosses rising out of the patterned earth in greens, as well as the browns of a canopied umbrella that extends over the central forms.

As in much of Senathipathi’s work, the symbolic use of motifs, whether of the staring eyes embedded in the central column of an ancient prophet with a flowing beard, the fallen body of a hero on the ground; and the emblematic hand held out in a gesture of peace, or warning, can be interpreted in many ways.

Manickam Senathipathi had always been the calm centre of the often turbulent but always creatively exuberant and multi-talented community of artists pioneered by the great KCS Paniker at the Cholamandal Artists’ Village. He earned the respect of both the legendary pioneers of the first generation of artists and those who now carry the flaming paintbrush, if not the blowtorch of metal reliefs, or the chisel of stone craft, into the future. As the subtext to Cholamandal indicates, it is both an arena for the arts and crafts. In Senathipathi’s case, his earlier and most famous pieces were of the beaten metal images that combined both art and craft with equal felicity. 

The most iconic of these often featured a figure of Krishna playing his flute on a silvered background of beaten metal. Or more flagrantly a tender interlude of lovelorn maidens entranced by Krishna’s melodic notes clustering around him like the vines of a cannonball flower in mid-summer. Senatipathi’s work combined an austere approach with very subtle erotic effects.

To quote from his artist’s statement, Senathipathi writes: In my work, I have never ceased to be a mythologist, but the present has held in my thoughts, a certain concern for the human condition. To voice this mood, I have depicted in my metal reliefs, as also my paintings, concepts which relate to insecurity in life. In depicting these expressions, I also deal with beauty and the human behaviour such as affection that makes life more meaningful today.”

As explained by his son Saravanan, Senathipathi was attached to his ancestral village in Cheyur, Madurantakam. The sounds and drumbeat of Tamil Nadu’s cultural diversity resonate almost effortlessly in his work. One sees it in the richly patterned surfaces of the people languidly reclining in some of his compositions, or the vibrant colours of his canvases that became a part of his repertoire in later years.