Krishen Khanna speaks to Jane Mikkelson about politics and form.
When the Progressive Artists’ Group, the spearhead of the modern avant-garde art movement in India, first pierced the thick hide of the visual arts establishment, Krishen Khanna was one of the dashing young figures behind it, along with MF Husain, FN Souza, SH Reza and others. Today, Khanna is still as relevant and indispensable to Indian art. A retrospective exhibition comes to Lalit Kala Akademi this fortnight, to examine this long modernist road.
Born in 1925, Khanna studied in England, witnessed Partition firsthand and worked as a banker for 14 years before he turned to art and was inducted into the Progressive Artists’ Group. The paintings on display span his career, including such famous canvasses as “The Last Bite” (2005, see Pic). In this painting, 12 men sit around a table in a manner that strongly evokes Michelangelo’s “Last Supper”, and these gentlemen are none other than Khanna’s friends and colleagues, all of them members of the Progressive Artists’ Group. The artists have all gathered around MF Husain, who is portrayed as the Christ-figure. Khanna has not painted himself into the picture, and he slyly leaves it up to the viewers to decide who among them is Judas.
The retrospective also features more recent works, most of which engage with themes like Partition, refugees and dispossession (see Pic, “Refugees 1947”, 2009). Khanna was 21 years old in 1947, when he and his family were forced to leave their hometown Lahore.
“I was part of it [Partition], but I didn’t produce anything at the time. You can’t digest something like that immediately. A work of art takes a lot of gestation and time,” Khanna said. Many of these newer paintings – the result of 60 years of reflection – portray the experiences of his family and servants during Partition. “I think it’s a pity,” Khanna said. “We were getting along just fine, even though we came from different religious backgrounds. It was ethnic cleansing on both sides, a fever which was prevalent among both [Hindus and Muslims]. Sanity took a big hit at the time.”
The fraught connection between art and politics can be summed up with what is today’s favourite relationship catchphrase: it’s complicated. Khanna dismissed the argument for “pure art” (that is, art untainted by politics) as an essentially late-nineteenth-century theory. While he conceded that art lies outside the political periphery, he also stressed that “it gets political when you see injustice, and that comes out in the art. I take a lot of my work from the humdrum of life. To study art and aesthetics as removed from real life is fine if you’re an academic – you can look at them under a microscope, dissect them. But a microscope doesn’t reveal the universe, does it?”
The solution hangs in that golden balance. Khanna is not in sympathy with most modern art, which he said has the tendency “to degenerate into pattern-making without feeling, heart and soul. I can’t go gaga over Andy Warhol.” But he also said that he doesn’t want his own work to become political, at least not overtly. “Just a triangle isn’t a good picture, and just painting the humdrum isn’t a good picture either,” he said. “A good picture is a good picture.” That is, at the very least, a standard he has held himself high above for 60 years.
Source : Time Out Delhi ISSUE 11 Friday, August 20, 2010
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