Work of Krishen Khanna

From the series on the truck – the ramshackle juggernaut hurtling into space piled up with construction materials and brutalized labour, to the generals and politicians negotiating peace around the table with the skeleton of humanity lying under it, to Jesus and his betrayal, to the cacophonic irrelevance of the marching band, Krishen has been preoccupied in his work with the state and fate of man in our times. In a sense, his work is a graphic record, a visual documentation. What makes it art and lifts it out of the transient, are the abiding elements of the tragic, the sublime and the ridiculous -which are woven into it’.
--Jagdish Swaminathan

Artist Krishen Khanna is known not only for being prolific but also has influenced the artscape of India, capturing with brilliance and accuracy the vibrant hues of a diverse nation. Last living member of the Progressives Art Group, in India, Krishen Khanna who turned 96 on July 5th 2021 , is perhaps one of the most versatile self taught modernists of our times. His life and art has been witness to some of the most turbulent times of India’s political history and his works traverse an Indian idiom of everyday living . A voracious reader, think tank and greatly respected, Khanna is an artist who has weathered all seasons in his 96 years. Khanna grew up in pre-partition Lahore, before moving to England, to study at the Imperial Service College on a scholarship. These early years of life with family and friends was the subject of some of his earliest works, where he reconstructed this “small, composite world, in which religious difference and the slowly gathering tide of nationalism were only a distant rumble.” His friendship with the Progressive Artist Group (PAG) brought him to hold his first exhibition in 1949 with them in Mumbai. He joined the PAG on the invitation of MF Husain. His love for an abstracted figurative terrain saw him through events and images that transcend time. Into his subjects he wove a universality and aesthetic that was rooted in Indian idioms and one that embraced deeper human values. Residence at the American University in Washington in the years 1963-64.

Khanna the voracious reader has also created a series from the Mahabharata as well as a series on musicians and other subjects. His A Far Afternoon is a monumental work of many panels. His handling of the human form and the abstracted elements along with a panoramic perspective all come together to create a fascinating ensemble of characters.One of his earliest works The Day Gandhi Died is yet another masterpiece of deep devotion and pathos as you look at people reading newspapers to read details of Mahatma Gandhi’s death. Emotion and evocation writ large this work reflects Khanna at his potent best in terms of the translation of event and history in memory onto canvas.Khanna consistently embedded the figurative idiom in his everyday life paintings. Populated by a cast of characters, his canvasses are intrinsic to the Indian streets: Chaplinesque bandwallahs in red uniforms, stoic truck drivers huddled with mouths covered, busy dhaba (roadside eatery) owners , fruit sellers, and even card players engrossed in their game.People in their humdrum existence became his subjects.

Truckwallahs

From the early 1970s, Khanna’s work engaged with urban life as he experienced it in the rapidly expanding metropolis of Delhi, particularly through subaltern figures like the bandwallahs, truckwallahs and manual labourers he encountered.The truckwalla series were austere and more or less monochrome while the bandwallahs were created in crimson yellow and scarlet with a dash of green. In his evolution he says: ” I got involved with painting the rear of trucks with the huddle up and dehumanized cargoes of labourers, a common enough sight in the country. Since the men at the back acquired the character and colour of the cargo that they were carrying, it was only appropriate that they and the tortuous machines be painted in monochrome. A series of grey and dusty pictures were painted.” In these works he “depicts the hard life of rural migrant labourers who form an important part of the urban landscape, in the late hours of the day when the privileged step out for a night of entertainment. Covered with dust, their identity obscured by a thick veil of grime, the figures in these monochromatic paintings seem to disappear into the fold of the city to which they migrated in the hope of a better life [...] the truck becomes an on-the-spot home, on the move, emphasising rootlessness as well as alienation.” (R. Karode and S. Sawant, ‘City Lights, City Limits – Multiple Metaphors in Everyday Urbanism’, Art and Visual Culture in India 1857-2007, Mumbai, 2009, p. 198)

Bandwallahs

Beginning in the 1980s, the Bandwallahs became a recurrent theme in Khanna’s oeuvre. Khanna’s ability to translate the daily life and pathos of the common man is what kept his works alive and animated with a human spirit of eking out a life. Delhi’s bandwallahs held a comic and bold portrayal -their bright colourful uniforms, gold epaulettes and brass buttons right down to their often tired expressions as they belted out the same tunes repeatedly for one wedding procession after another.This year at Grosvenor in London he created the Bandwallahs in deep despair thinking of what they would be doing during the pandemic with such few festivities and weddings.And his words of the past come back: “What would happen were I to begin with no drawing or compositional props, where figures are not in space but are space themselves, and colours ringing loud and clear in merry juxtaposition without tonal continuities or intermediary grays, and the application of colour pigment were assertive and not tentative? I found a new exuberance in the act of painting. Using the image of the Bandwallahs, I let it go, not attempting to rub out or physically eradicate, and gave vent to all the possibilities stimulated by that odd instinct.” (Krishen Khanna, ‘Beyond the Bandwalla’s Cacophony: a non- committal statement by the artist’ ) His obsession with the Chaplinesque bandwallahs in red uniforms is well known, but not many know that he picked on them not only because Krishen has always painted the ‘common man’, but also because they were the “post-Partition variety”. “There is something sad and musical about them. Like refugees, they too came to this side of the border and like me, they too didn’t know what to do in life. They had the skill, got together and waited for the first wedding session. The irony is that nobody wants them otherwise. So, I have some affinity for them,” he says.
Celebration at Ravensdale , Oil on canvas

Verve and versatility

From the richness of mythology and literature he painted stories of the Mahabharata drawing from the rich fount as he created Dhritharashtra and Gandhari and many more characters with verve and versatility.His work Blessing on the Battlefield is from his famous series of drawings. It runs like a narrative of the battlefield and the journey. Varying in size and subjects, these unusually large drawings appear from the recesses of a nuanced imagination, to present a play about little and big heroisms, small ironies and monumental follies. At the apex appears the work, Benediction on the Battlefield, the moment of the Pandavas wishing farewell to Bhishma Pitamah before his death, an image that Khanna had worked on over the decades. Victorious in battle over the Kauravas, the Pandavas speak with the great preceptor in his final hours. Propped up on his bed of arrows, Bhishma addresses Yudhishthira on the nature of kingship and different forms of truth: “Nothing sees like knowledge, nothing purifies like truth, nothing delights like giving, nothing enslaves like desire.” At this juncture, in the twilight of a battle in which there are no victors, Krishen creates a compact between two great textual sources, the Mahabharata and the Bible, with their narrative of adversarial conflict and persecution and the memory site of his own experience, the Partition of India

The human figure

Khanna’s paintings are usually large. They fascinate viewers for their magnitude of fervour and flavour in humanist codes. “I like to paint large, because it is infinitely more rewarding to me as a painter. When you do not see the edges of the painting—it spreads like the Ajanta murals—that’s very conducive to a narrative. When you tell a story it must have gravitas and its own integrity. I have always felt large canvasses are a bigger challenge and you are glued in for a long period of time. Large pictures necessitate this penetrative way of looking. And the human figure has so many perspectives and generates so many emotions. The human has a multiplicity of attributes and is a compound of so many actions.”

Khanna reflected on his choice of the human figure. “It’s not easy being a figurative painter—you have to be true to space, colour, the drawing and, more than that, to the image that you’re taking.” He drew upon eclectic references which encompassed everything from poetry to Indian miniatures, to the European masterpieces he’s been revisiting since he was a boy. “It is like ploughing and fertilising a field, you don’t know what crop will grow, but something does come out when you’re completely switched to one line of thinking. This would have never happened if I had not left (banking). I might have become a good Sunday painter.”

News of Gandhiji’s Death 1948

The partition and its aftermath had a huge impact on Khanna. His painting of 1948 News of Gandhiji’s Death is a historic milestone in memory and impact on India’s masses. In this painting we see an array of Indians united in shock. Silenced by the tragedy they stand reading the newspaper. We also note differences in clothing, class, and gender, amongst them we Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh figures standing and reading the news under a street light, surrounded by darkness. News of Gandhiji’s Death was featured in a 1949 exhibition of works by the Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group, an informal collective. with which Khanna later became associated. He shared the group’s search to apply modern aesthetics to describe the hopes and fears of independent India. News of Gandhiji’s Death, for example, uses a painterly technique to define modernist distortions of perspective, colour, and figure, but maintains clarity and precision by representing the fraught and increasingly divided population of India.

In 1990 Krishen Khanna was awarded the prestigious Padma Shri, one of the Indian government’s highest civilian awards, and in 1997 he received the Kala Ratna from the All India Fine Arts & Crafts Society. In 2000 the Indian Govt bestowed on him the prestigious Padma Bhushan for his unparalled contribution to Indian contemporary art. He has participated in the Venice, São Paulo, Havana and Tokyo biennales and in the International Triennale in New Delhi. He has exhibited in solo and group shows around the world, in places like New York, London, New Orleans, Honolulu, Oxford, Washington, D.C., Geneva, and at the festival of India in Japan. Khanna lives and works in New Delhi-he just celebrated his 96th birthday. He is the last living member of the Progressive Arts Group of Mumbai. He was invited to join by M.F Husain. The members of the Progressive Arts Group were his close friends. Important works from this series are part of the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, as well as the Jehangir Nicholson Foundation in Mumbai.

Uma Nair
Curator

KRISHEN KHANNA

A largely self-taught artist, Khanna studied at the Imperial Service College, Windsor, England, from where he graduated in 1940. After his family's move to India, a job with Grindlays Bank brought him to Bombay where he was invited to be a part of the now famous Progressive Artists’ Group. The first exhibition in which Khanna’s works were featured was one of this Group’s exhibitions held in 1949. In 1955, Khanna had his first solo show at the USIS, Chennai, and since then has been exhibiting his work widely in India and abroad. Among his solo exhibitions are Krishen Khanna: Drawings & Paintings at Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi, in 2016; When the Band Begins to Play... at Grosvenor Gallery, London, in 2015; A Celebration of Lines at Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai, in 2013; Krishen Khanna: A Retrospective presented by Saffronart, Mumbai at Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, in 2010; The Savage Heart at Cymroza Art Gallery, Mumbai, in 2008; Krishen Khanna, Saffronart and Berkeley Square Gallery, London, in 2005; and An Airing at Pundole Art Gallery, Mumbai, in 2004. Recent group exhibitions include Ideas of the Sublime, presented by Vadehra Art Gallery at Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, in 2013; The Discerning Eye: Modern Masters at Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi, in 2013; and Masterclass at Dhoomimal Art Gallery, New Delhi, in 2011.
In 1964, Khanna was artist-in-residence at the American University, Washington D.C. In 1965, he won a fellowship from the Council for Economic and Cultural Affairs, New York following the travel grant they had awarded him three years earlier. Recognising his immense contribution to Indian Art, the Government of India has bestowed several honours upon him including the Lalit Kala Ratna from the President of India in 2004 and the Padma Shri in 1990. In the year 2000 he was conferred upon with the Padma Bhushan for his contribution to contemporary Indian art as a versatile modernist.

Krishen Khanna lives and works in New Delhi.
(Saffronart.com)