Osian's Auction Catalogue Indian Modern and Contemporary Art | January 2008

127 In the example I have taken, Woman Smelling Flower , the smile is a grimace, perhaps, and yet sense of humor – or rather wit – is not merely ironical, there is a touch of laughter here, which points to another aspect of Pyne’s creativity in his middle period. The laughter evinces a clearer artistic distancing of vision – however sardonic and wrought with the bitter evocation of fatality its overtones might still be – which was missing in the more intense earlier works. The distancing of this period is both a sign of wit and of wisdom, a growing and complex deepening of understanding. In Woman Smelling Flower , Pyne’s distancing may appear to some as too overshadowed with a sense of alienation from life, a sardonic withdrawal from it and yet no one can mistake a calm here, an almost timeless quietude of tone and ambience which has a myth-like presence. There is also a historical allusion here, which adds to the complexity of wit. The face of the woman in the Woman Smelling Flower is in sharp profile with a flower ‘delicately’ balanced close to it and mirroring it’s ‘beauty’, as it were. The image is deliberately and flower-like queens and princesses holding a flower to their face. This painterly allusion might appear at the first glance to have overtones of caricature. A deeper appraisal shows that the intent to be deeply serious: what appears to be a caricature is really a metaphorical bridge suggesting the timelessness of Death. The petals of the flower with their beautifully painted sinews of decaying bones, the alluring hues of the dead bones in the young flesh of the princess, suggest the ever-present mystery of death. The work is saved from being a caricature by the fact that Pyne’s wry and somewhat macabre sense of irony is encapsulated in a mythic ambience in which life forever encounters death. The ‘woman’ in this painting is clearly not a person. She is, on the contrary, a quintessential image of the dissolution of personality, and anything like a selfhood. She can also be taken as a significant representative of Pyne’s earlier use of the human figure. The Behulà , if we keep this in mind, comes as a great surprise. One meaningful way of feeling the contrast can be to look at the difference in the approach to Death here. Death has a strong presence here, too. Our eyes are quickly captured by the dry, somber, practical sheen- less bones of Behulà’s dead husband, who she holds in her arms (Pyne’s use of colour here has a very self-conscious matt surface). But it is not the dead figure but Behulà herself who dominates our vision. And we accost her as a person: a person of more than ordinary dimensions, but still a recognizable person. We respond to the invincible strength of character in her. She is determined, we perceive, to bring her dead husband back to life. Her eyes, her face, her very mien is alive and luminous with her resolve and her purpose. We can sense her profound grief, but overriding it we feel, palpably feel, her will, pulsating unwaveringly in her flame-like eyes. The blue and orange-yellow (or is it saffron?) which are the most vital colours in the painting, indeed, make her entire presence seem flame-like. In my response to Behulà , I also feel the vibrations of an older, more familiar, legend: the story of Savitri (who had persuaded Yama, the Lord of Death, himself to give her husband back to her) as it occurs in the Mahabharata . The story of Savitri is so well known that the allusion cannot be missed. In Savitri too we have a person who is recognizably human, though again a person of extraordinary will and character. Indeed, if the painting did not possess a title, I would have taken it as a depiction of Savitri. In both the stories – of Behulà , and of Savitri the approach to death is qualitatively different from Pyne’s own earlier approach. There is an assertion of life here, and a negation, even a defiance of death. What we have is human individual will and character facing up to to death on its own terms. We have, however, to wait and see how the new note in Pyne develops.