K. G. Subramanyan - Later Life and Legacy

Later Life and Legacy

Active for more than 65 years, and alive and very contemporary at 85 K.G.Subramanyan is one of India’s most engaging and influential artists. Born in Kerala in the early 20s and keenly interested in the arts since childhood, he, however, decided to study art only after an initial engagement with socialist and Gandhian activism and a short term in prison for participation in the Quit India Movement. Debarred from government colleges for his involvement in the national movement he left Madras where he was pursuing a degree in economics and moved to Santiniketan in 1944, and from the orbit of Gandhi to the orbit of Rabindranath]].

In Santiniketan he came into intimate contact with Nandalal Bose and his close associates in the new art movement, Benodebehari Mukherjee, and Ramkinkar Baij, who sensitized him to the requisites of a national modernism. From them he learned to see art as a response to social and personal needs for communication and expression, and to seek a perspective on art which has a cultural rather than a professional horizon.

This led him to simultaneously pursue the varied roles of artist, designer and teacher and to make them mutually enriching. His early work which he has described as an ‘apotheosis of the ordinary’ was in tune with those of his contemporaries but they were more cautiously explorative and syntactically measured rather than charged with youthful audacity or rendered with bravura. The decorative sometimes clashed with the expressive initially, but by the 60s he was as an exemplar of the artistic versatility that art-craft interface can lead to.

Doing paintings structured with the communicational efficacy of consummate design, and printed and painted textiles and woven sculptures with the aesthetic subtlety and expressive economy of art, designing toys that are expressive and witty, illuminated books in which text and image extend each another, and murals in which details and the aggregate play hide and seek of image and meaning he became in the 60s an artist who amplified his expressive reach by extending his communicational range.

If during the 60s by increasing his spectrum of activity he enlarged his range of communication and expressiveness, during the 70s Subramanyan demonstrated through his re-articulation of the age old techniques of terracotta and his retake on the popular genre of glass painting how an artist can tap older practices to add the semantic resonances of one’s work. While most modernists by conforming to a personal style brought their individuality into sharp focus but narrowed their range of activities and skills Subramanyan preferred to develop a personal language and use its syntactic plasticity to enlarge his communicational reach. And it was a strategy that paid off.

It helped Subramanyan to embrace an enduring vision and ethics but innovate continuously and to burgeon from decade to decade. And his recent work, thought provoking and celebratory, teasing and subversive, humane and irreverent at once and done with scintillating spontaneity, is not only more expressive and complex than anything he has done in the past but also some of the most vital art today. This comes partly from his growing engagement with the world; and partly from the way he moves from one level of communication or expression to another through calculated inflections of his visual idiom. And the ease with which he does this, whether it be in the simple platters he paints for an art fair or in the expansive murals orchestrated to come alive at many levels, is truly phenomenal.

A lucid and perceptive writer, an inspired educator closely associated with the art institutions at Baroda and Santiniketan, and a design-consultant associated for many years with national and international bodies for design education and crafts promotion, Subramanyan has also been able to share his ideas and vision with three generations of Indian artists and designers, and has had a seminal influence on the art and design practice in India.

As an artist with the ingenuity of a consummate craftsman and the alertness of a nimble thinker Subramanyan’s perspectives on art and life still carry resonances of his early engagement with the nationalist movement, but he is also an artist with an incisive insight into the contemporary world with its alluring sensualities and unsettling complexities and a wise and witty commentator on our times. And a modernist who convinces us that contact with traditions can add cultural and linguistic depth to an artist’s work, and that an awareness of global practices can coexist with sensitivity to local environment.

Subramanyan is as revered as an artist as he is as a theoretician and art historian. His chief contribution as a theorist has been the rigorous re-contextualization of Western theories and practices in the Indian or Oriental context, as well pointing out the fundamental differences between the Western and Indian social realities, namely the problem of art/craft division of the Indian artistic traditions. As an artist he is known as one of the most versatile practitioners, having done works, apart from painting, in the traditions of mural, various craft traditions of India, toy-making, pottery, illustration & design, terracotta sculpture. His paintings are noted for their inherent wit, ironies, satire and critical social commentaries.