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Journalism of Courage
ARTIST, short story writer, gay comrade, humourist, friend, lover8212;Bhupen Khakhar was all this and more to a wide spectrum of people.
8216;8216;This is a huge loss to a large circle of friends whom he kept entertained with his brilliant sense of humour and his enriching presence,8217;8217; says Shireen Gandhy of Mumbai8217;s Gallery Chemould who, along with Usha Mirchandani of the Fine Art Resource, was at the artist8217;s bedside before he passed away on the evening of August 8 at Vadodara8217;s Bhailal Amin Hospital.
Khakhar had been fighting cancer since 1997, and doctors recently told him he had at least one more year of creativity left. He would have turned 70 next March and his big retrospective8212;Mirchandani was in the midst of organising it8212;was due later this year.
8216;8216;Bhupen was very excited about this show. It will be the first time his country acknowledges his importance as a contemporary artist. He always felt a little let down that Berlin and Madrid were the first to have big exhibitions of his work8212;not his own country,8217;8217; says Mirchandani who, along with Khakhar8217;s friends, has decided to go ahead with the show in November.
It could have been the frank homoerotic nature of his paintings that caused government organisations to play shy, but it never stopped Khakhar from painting.
Trained as an accountant, Khakhar was a self-taught painter and revelled in the freedom from 8216;formal8217; academic training. Instead, he drew inspiration from medieval manuscripts of pre-Renaissance painters like H Bosh.
He was also one of the first to embrace Pop Art that artist KG Subramanyan brought to Vadodara8217;s Faculty of Fine Arts, where Khakhar studied Art History in the 8217;70s. Infusing kitsch, Pop and the narrative style, Khakhar came up with his own personal brand of painting.
8216;8216;He was brave and uncompromising. He painted difficult themes like his series on gay relationships,8217;8217; says Vadodara-based artist Gulammohammed Sheikh who shared both his work and an enduring 35-year-long friendship with the late artist. 8216;8216;Later, when he was diagnosed with cancer, he thought nothing of drawing on the subject of pain and disease8212;paintings that people, I8217;m sure, won8217;t put up in their drawing rooms.8217;8217;
Khakhar was one of the few painters many were comfortable working with. Artist Nalini Malani was one of them. 8216;8216;Any project with Bhupen was always fun. We all sat like karigars on the floor, touching up each other8217;s paintings leaving behind our egos,8217;8217; says Malani who worked with Khakhar and Sundaram on a joint mural that began in 1988 and ended two years later.
But it was not just his own generation of painters that Khakhar moved.
Atul Dodiya, who has known Khakhar since his art student days, has since painted him thrice and showed with him at Madrid. 8216;8216;What I love about his work is that the common man is the hero of his paintings,8217;8217; says Dodiya. 8216;8216;That gentle mocking quality, with which he chided their expectations of life and religion, is what I relish.8217;8217;
