The coat of many colours

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 — from the orbit of Gandhian politics to the orbit of Tagorean cultural reimagination.

In Santiniketan, he came into intimate contact with Nandalal Bose and his close associates, Benodebehari Mukherjee and Ramkinkar Baij, who were ushering in a new art movement. They sensitised him to the requisites of a national modernism that drew on local life and environment. From them, he learned to see art as a response to social and personal needs, 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 a teacher, and make them mutually enriching. His early work, which he described as an “apotheosis of the ordinary”, was in tune with those of his contemporaries. However, they were cautiously explorative and syntactically measured, rather than charged with youthful audacity or rendered with bravura. But, by the beginning of 1960s, he had gathered all his explorations together and became an exemplar of the artistic versatility that art-craft interface can lead to.

During the 1960s, on the one hand, he did paintings structured with a designer’s sense of function and communicational efficacy, and, on the other, produced hand-painted textiles and woven sculptures with the aesthetic subtlety and expressive economy of art. He also designed toys that are expressive and witty, illuminated books — ostensibly meant for children but equally alluring to the thinking adult — and murals in which details and the aggregate play hide-and-seek with image and meaning. He had become 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 1970s, 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 to the semantic resonances of one’s work. While most of his contemporaries narrowed their range of activities and conformed to a personal style to bring their individuality into focus, Subramanyan preferred to develop a personal language and use its plasticity to enlarge his communi-cational reach.

It was a strategy that paid off. It helped Subramanyan embrace an enduring vision and ethics, to innovate continuously, and grow in vitality from decade to decade. His late work was remarkably fresh. If anything, it was more thought-provoking and celebratory, teasing and subversive, expressive and complex, humane and irreverent, all at once, and done with more scintillating spontaneity than anything he had done in the past.

This came partly from his deep engagement with the world, and partly, from the way he moved from one level of expression to another, through calculated inflections of his visual idiom. He was immensely knowledgeable about world art and craft traditions and yet, as an artist, he could work with great freedom. The ease with which he did this, be it the simple platters he painted for an art fair at Santiniketan or the expansive murals, was truly phenomenal.

Besides being a versatile artist, he was a perceptive writer, an inspired educator closely associated with the art institutions in Baroda and Santiniketan, and a design consultant associated with national and international bodies for design education and crafts promotion. He shared his ideas and vision with three generations of Indian artists and designers, and exercised a seminal influence on the art and design practice in India.
Subramanyan’s perspective on art and life carried resonances of his early engagement with the nationalist movement. It also held an incisive insight into the contemporary world with its alluring sensualities and unsettling complexities, making him a a wise and a witty commentator. He was a Modernist who convinced us that traditions can add cultural and linguistic depth to an artist’s work, and that an awareness of global practices can coexist with sensivity to local environment.

He did not seek fame but was more than famous; he was admired by fellow artists and students for his artistic brilliance, and respected and loved for his generosity of spirit. He exuded confidence and a sense of self-worth without being over-bearing. He did not seek power or favour, and was candid in his engagements. As a teacher, he exercised the same kind of forthrightness; he did not pat backs, but helped his students find his or her strength and build upon that. This made their indebtedness to him grow with time. And, whenever necessary, he became their silent benefactor. His artistic legacy will be an important chapter in the post-colonial history of modern Indian art, and that of his humanity will live in the minds of those who knew him and, perhaps, teach them to live each day as a celebration, as he did.

R Siva Kumar is a critic and a curator