Divine Art

We continued our arts-sojourn in Kolkata at the Academy of Fine Arts.

My favorite painting in the Academy was of Ganesh. I'm used to walking into the famous art museums of Europe and seeing tormented Christs and bloody passions, but in India it's equally likely that I'll find a serene Ganesh, legs crossed and belly bulging, gazing at the world over his sinuous trunk. (Artists have made much of this trunk - it's been wound around in the shape of an Aum, or painted in leaves, or otherwise represented in ways both beautiful and mysterious) There are traditional ways to show Ganesh. I've seen sculptures of Ganesh riding a rat, or clutching pens in his hands. But the Academy artist had created a levitating Ganesh, done up in cool colors with a bronze wash over all. I kept coming back to it.

I also liked another painting by the same artist, this time a Krishna. Krishna also has a rich artistic tradition to back him up. He's often painted with skin either cream or blue, surrounded by cows and adoring girls, piping merrily way on his flute. Krishna is playful where Ganesh is serene, he's naughty where Kali is forbidding. His cheeks are plump, and I've never seen a Krishna who isn't smiling. But the Krishna in the Academy was also different - he was blue and serious. His flute was a slash of pale paint, absent its usual dangles.
I'm not surprised that young artists would want to re-imagine traditional religious images in their art. Plenty of young Christian arists play with images of the Cross, so of course Indian Hindus (and those who aren't Hindus but who grew up in an environment where Hindu imagery prevailed) would reexamine Krishna and Ganesh. It is interesting to me to see how this is happening - both of these paintings were clearly modern, and they showed the Gods in a manner I'd never come across before. (Actual Indians might not have been so surprised. After all, they've been living in India and witnessed firsthand the evolution of representations of God. But I don't have that advantage. I jumped straight from the twenty-year-old sandalwood Krishna statue in my parents puja room to the moody, surreal Krishna in the Academy of Fine Arts. I only have bits and pieces of the Indian cultural narrative to draw on. Again, I don't know why this surprises me. Perhaps because I spent so many years thinking of myself as an Indian and am only now realizing that this, in the words of the Princess Bride, "doesn't mean what I thought it meant.")

It's worth mentioning, I guess, that most of the paintings I saw were not religious in nature. But the religious ones caught my attention, so they're the ones I'm talking about now.