Art: Brightness from Bengal

On a visit to Calcutta, Mahatma Gandhi once sent word to Jamini Roy to bring some paintings around for a private showing. The artist politely refused. “As a man,” said Roy, “I will gladly go and touch his feet with my hands. As an artist, never. It is his duty to come and visit me.”

In 45 years, Jamini Roy, one of India’s best artists, has rarely allowed his work to be exhibited outside his studio; Paris and London have seen his pictures just once. Last week, with an exhibit in Manhattan, he gave the outside world another look at his work.

Eyes Like Almonds. Jamini Roy is as different from most of his fellow Indian artists as curry from ice cream. Most young Indians who go to Europe to study art turn out either politely classic or dutifully modern work. Other Indian painters stick to the brutally, sensuous Brahman school of temple art or turn out dreamy, idealized mythological figures. But almost all ignore India’s primitive, bold village art. Not so Jamini Roy, who has drawn much inspiration from it and combined it with a slick modernity. His tempera panels show village girls, Bengali dancers, mothers and children, such scenes as Gosto, the flute-playing God of Love, and his friends tending the cows, all of them almost toylike figures with flat, stylized bodies and immense almond eyes.

His colors are jewel-bright: a many-headed demon is emerald green; Ganesh, the God of Success, is a pink elephant dancing on a jet black mouse with ruby eyes; sphinxlike maidens are sapphire blue and brick red. When Roy wants to, he can also turn out quick line drawings that catch precisely the pinched, ascetic face of a Hindu priest or the sweeping curves of a nude girl combing her hair.

Clothes for Canvas. India’s more Westernized artists refer to Roy’s work as “mere folk art.” Roy does not care. “Don’t think I’ll change my style,” he says. Artist Roy, trained at Calcutta’s Government School of Art, spent 15 years as a successful dauber of polite European-type landscapes that looked good in the best Indian homes. Then, at the age of 34, he got bored and decided to look at his country again through Indian eyes. Going back to the villages of his native Bengal, he learned about local folklore and religious customs, simplified his style and began copying the primitive pictures he saw on mud huts. At first his dancing devils and elephant gods were not successful, and for years he barely kept alive. Sometimes he used his clothes for canvas—first smeared with cow dung to stiffen them, then whitewashed to make a painting surface. He mixed his own inexpensive paints, including such ingredients as rock dust, mud and lampblack.

Today, at 66, Roy sells his pictures as fast as he can paint them. Manhattan’s gallerygoers found Roy’s work exciting. By the end of the show’s first week half of the 27 paintings and drawings had been sold. Back in Calcutta, Jamini Roy would take the news with equanimity. Says he: “All I really need in life is a simple earthen pot for food and a straw mat to sleep on. They are the only real things in life.”