Important Notice

Partially concealed behind a moss‒covered stone wall and dense foliage, the boy in the present lot peers through strands of barbed wire, his strange luminous gaze drawing the viewer in. The dense vegetation and crumbling masonry evoke North Calcutta’s decaying mansions and neglected gardens that fascinated Bikash Bhattacharjee, where “the once‒tended gardens... have been overtaken by weeds” and whose “sculpted stone beauties... return to my... Partially concealed behind a moss‒covered stone wall and dense foliage, the boy in the present lot peers through strands of barbed wire, his strange luminous gaze drawing the viewer in. The dense vegetation and crumbling masonry evoke North Calcutta’s decaying mansions and neglected gardens that fascinated Bikash Bhattacharjee, where “the once‒tended gardens... have been overtaken by weeds” and whose “sculpted stone beauties... return to my paintings over and over again.” (Artist quoted in Manasij Majumder, “Bikash Bhattacharjee on Bikash Bhattacharjee,” Close to Events, New Delhi: Niyogi Books, 2007, p. 183)

Bhattacharjee first came to prominence through his desolate cityscapes of Calcutta, where “the familiar crowded jungle of asphalt streets and brick and mortar buildings” appeared strangely abandoned and unfamiliar. Yet, as Pranab Ranjan Roy observed, the artist was “more concerned with the larger human drama than just the human meaning of a situation to remain involved with landscape as a genre,” and by the mid‒1960s his attention had shifted towards psychologically charged portraiture. (Pranab Ranjan Roy, p. 92)

After the artist’s move to the outskirts of Calcutta in 1987, where “nature encroached on the city”, the altered environment brought about a deep change in both his subject matter and his perception of the urban scene. “A pensive serenity prevails…showing human figures and nature in a tender directness but also unearthing a mysterious, even eerie sense of their archaic unity.” (Marta Jakimowicz‒Karle, “Man in Mysteries of Nature,” Bikash Bhattacharjee, Bangalore: Kala Yatra, 1991, p. 41)

The present lot belongs to a period when children assumed renewed significance in his paintings. As Karle observed, these works “speak of a very intimate relationship between the painter and his subjects, as though…the images contained a part of himself”. The Boy series (1990) came as both “a tribute to certain cherished qualities of children” and “an unveiling of the child in him”, the boy becoming “a metaphor for himself in the world.” (Karle, p. 47) As Majumder notes, “the hero is not necessarily the child Bikash but someone like him”—a street urchin, a slum boy, a child from old Calcutta in whom the artist could recognise both his remembered imagination and a wider human experience. (Majumder, p. 200)

Nowhere is this empathy more powerfully conveyed than through the eyes of his figures. “He may illuminate the eyes of a figure, making light pass through to render them translucent till the soul is intuited…Sometimes the eyes acquire a wild, eerie glimmer.” (Karle, p. 1) Here, the boy’s eyes shine with an uncanny luminosity, becoming a threshold to a larger, unseen world.

“What you see is a single moment in time... Painting should be like this. It should have a mystery, a story. My passion for narrative and its sudden arrest was formed during the days when I used to watch films... The dramatic narrative fascinated me.” - BIKASH BHATTACHARJEE

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