Important Notice

The present lot is one of a rare handful of surviving paintings and illustrations made by Ganesh Pyne during his tenure as a cartoon animator for filmmaker Mandar Mallick in the 1960s. Landscapes such as these functioned as background settings for animated films. Transparent strips painted with anthropomorphized characters were sequentially moved over them and registered onto celluloid to produce scenes for various children’s cartoons. Notably,... The present lot is one of a rare handful of surviving paintings and illustrations made by Ganesh Pyne during his tenure as a cartoon animator for filmmaker Mandar Mallick in the 1960s. Landscapes such as these functioned as background settings for animated films. Transparent strips painted with anthropomorphized characters were sequentially moved over them and registered onto celluloid to produce scenes for various children’s cartoons. Notably, a scale used as a guide for a stop-gap camera can be seen along the bottom right of this work.

The landscape in this work is naturalistic and devoid of contextual elements such as objects or figures. Remarking on these backdrops that Pyne created, critic Pranabranjan Ray notes, “With emphasis on the massy, dark shapes of the rocks, the undulated contours of the ground, the directional linearity of the plant trunks and branches, and, above all, on the spatial configuration of images (leaving lots of negative spaces in between), it becomes apparent that it is not simply a description of a landscape but an evocation of a feeling of desolation...” (Pranabranjan Ray, Mandar Studio Cornwallis Street, Kolkata: Akar Prakar, 2017) This compositional approach is understandable given the painting’s function as a backdrop for a larger animated scene, and yet it anticipates the heightened sense of desolation and melancholy that would come to characterise Pyne’s often macabre tempera paintings in the decades that followed. The foliage elements observed here are details that find echoes in these later works for which the artist became best known.

Pyne took up the part-time job at Mallick’s studio on Calcutta’s Cornwallis Street following his graduation from the Government Art College in 1961. Though it was poorly paid and only meant to be temporary, he stayed for over a decade and continued to use the studio as a workspace even after Mallick’s death in 1977. Mallick’s dreams of producing cartoons like Walt Disney in India had failed to materialise but Pyne deeply admired his unwavering devotion to his craft. He possessed an intuitive understanding of a child’s imagination and taught Pyne how to uncover entirely new worlds within the seemingly ordinary, an approach that fired the artist’s own imagination and later influenced the mysterious liminal worlds that defined his mature work.

As writer Ella Datta notes, the characters that Pyne created for Mallick had in “some subtle way... left an impression on his style, like the enlarged heads in his work and the two-dimensional treatment of the figures.” The dilapidated building in which the studio was located also made its presence felt in his later oeuvre. Datta further explains, “The building... had a character. Its crumbling plaster, the dark, shadowy staircase, the grey, weather-beaten wood, the uneven, cobbled floors created an atmosphere of mystery. One felt, the house had its own secrets. It certainly offered an enormous visual resource-base for Pyne. When one sees a battered boat in a Pyne painting, one recalls the old doors, windows and railings in that building. They looked rickety and precarious, but were weathered to an unbelievable resilience.” (Ella Datta, “Search for a Style”, Sathi Basu ed., Ganesh Pyne His Life and Times, Kolkata: CIMA, 1998, p. 42)

Read More
Artist Profile
Other works of this artist in: this auction  |  entire site