Page 45 - Eye of the beholder

effect. The final lines and colours and other details were reinforced which marked the painting as finished. Tempera was Majumdar’s preferred medium to enhance details particularly for fine jewellery, flowers, adornments, etc. The influence of Japanese art was manifest particularly in the wash technique, and the two artists who made a deep impact on Majumdar sensibility and generally on the modern Indian art were Hisida Shunsho and Yokoyama Taikan.
Majumdar worked in the layered wash technique, as his visionary subject-matter lent itself appropriately to the fulfillment of his passionate devotion to familiar Hindu eternal themes of Radha- Krishna and Chaitanya. This approach made his art introspective that marked a turn away from nature and man. The representation of the human form was equally expressionistic in its attenuation, which reflects his idea of spirituality, wherein he transformed them to belong to a transcendental realm. Majumdar’s lyrical and sentimental style was expressed through spatial compositions with fine outlined drawings, detailed ornamentation and highly mannered postures and expressions that became representative of his visual expression, which later reflected in his paintings based on the life of Chaitanya. Vaishnava stories suited his personal faith and hence chose to engage in painting scenes from the life of the Vaishnava saint Chaitanya, which were characterized by sadness and resignation.
His notion of engaging with line was to create a sense of exquisiteness in compositional structuring that resulted in manifesting this seminal tool with a poetic character that was as mellifluous as it was subtle, as graceful and charming as it was spiritual. Reinforcing this were his somber subdued coloured tones that remained the hall mark of his visual language, intensifying his personal approach in evoking his meditations on this subject and undeniably was his own personal vision. The compositions had clarity with subdued and suffused light with firmly outlined images, thus marking his individual posturing of style, in moving away from the haze that characterized Abanindranath’s works. An ambient aura of spirituality characterized his paintings consequent to his technique, thus bringing about a correspondence of his concept with the visual language and the technique that remains at the heart of his works.
In many ways it connects to the past tradition of Indian miniatures because of the small format he preferred to work with. According to Tapati Guha Thakurta, "line and tone blended, often to contribute to delicate and supple figure drawing combined with the sharpness and precision of Mughal miniature drawings. Such spatial compositions with fine outlined drawing, detailed ornamentation, and highly mannered postures and expressions became typical of most of the paintings of Mazumdar". His works thus characterized by simplicity and sincerity, lacked the romance of sophistication which had been set as parameters for defining modernity by the contemporary critics then, and hence the de rich acknowledgement of his art was consequently denied to him. Binod Behari Mukherjee referred to his works as “modern expression of India’s traditional art”.
In 1921, Kshitindranath was appointed Principal of the Indian Society of Oriental Art, Calcutta and from 1942-64 he became Principal of the Art Department at Allahabad University.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Jaya Appaswamy, “Kshitindranath Majumdar”, Lalit Kala Academi, New Delhi, 1967
Tapati Guha Thakurta, “The Making of a New ‘Indian’ Art: Artists, Aesthetics and Nationalism in Bengal, c.1850– 1920”, Cambridge South Asia, 1992
Partha Mitter, “Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1850–1922: Occidental Orientations”,
Cambridge University Press, 1995
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