Emami Arts retrospective | K.G. Subramanyan, Kolkata’s Tamil visionary

One Hundred Years and Counting, a new retrospective in Kolkata, aims to showcase the sheer breadth of artist K.G. Subramanyan’s creativity

During my visit to the Kolkata Centre for Creativity (KCC), a day after the opening of K.G. Subramanyan’s retrospective at Emami Art, I hear several stories about the renowned artist. Mani da, as he was affectionately known, “had a sweet tooth”, a former student of Shantiniketan tells me. “A colleague used to bake cakes for him every weekend in Shantiniketan. Even though I only met him when he was already ‘KG’ [shortened from Kalpathi Ganpathi], and he would come for lectures surrounded by people, he was always nice to me. He even did a quick sketch in my notebook once.”

Subramanyan, it seems, gave away his art to everyone — many of those who studied in Shantiniketan or visited the institution had received works from him. “Even then, there was enough artwork for so many retrospectives [like this one to mark the Kerala-born Tamil Brahmin’s centenary birth anniversary],” she adds. Another person tells me that the late artist, who passed away in 2016, had a caustic sense of humour.

“I came to know him when I joined Kala Bhavana as a Masters student,” says Ushmita Sahu, director and head curator of Emami Art. “And over the years, we [her husband Prasanta is an artist and teaches in Kala Bhavana] became very close to him and his daughter Uma. When he would visit our home in Santiniketan, I would cook for him and he would share his vast knowledge with us.”

I find mentions of KG everywhere I turn in Kolkata. Serendipitously, there are references to him even in Holding Time Captive, the biography of theatre persona and art collector Ebrahim Alkazi that I’m engrossed in. This comes as a surprise because I associate Alkazi with the Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group and KG had his roots firmly in Shantiniketan and folk arts such as patachitra. They seem miles away from each other, but a Kolkata friend tells me that Alkazi helped KG travel to England as a Fellow at the prestigious St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, in the 1980s.

His art falls under a category that another fellow attendee, the revered Shantiniketan teacher R. Siva Kumar, calls Contextual Modernism. It advocated for the incorporation of local elements in art along with humanism and cross-culturalism, rather than European modernist styles. KG, a freedom fighter before he came to the Shantiniketan School of Art, followed in the footsteps of his teachers Ramkinker Baij and Nandalal Bose, and of course, the founders of the Bengal School and Shantiniketan respectively, Abanindranath Tagore and Rabindranath Tagore.

KG experimented with a range of materials as well as themes. Over the 70-odd years of his career, he was a painter, printmaker, author, toy maker, muralist, and relief sculptor who made significant contributions to institutions such as the All-India Handloom Board and the World Craft Council Board. He remained an activist, institution builder, and teacher till the end of his life both at Shantiniketan and Maharaja Sayajirao University (MSU) in Baroda.

This exhibition, One Hundred Years and Counting: Re-Scripting KG Subramanyan — which has over 200 works curated by cultural theorist Nancy Adajania from the collections of Seagull Foundation, MSU, and Asia Art Archive — looks at KG’s large repository of work. As Adajania explains, this includes his “early paintings from the 1950s; iconic reverse paintings on acrylic, which look like polychrome stained glass windows; marker pen works on paper; postcard-size drawings from his visit to China; and toys made for the fine arts fairs”. It also has never-seen archival material such as handcrafted mock-ups of his children’s books and preparatory sketches for murals.