Osian's Auction Catalogue Creative India Series 1 Bengal | December 2011

JAmini roy Lots 47 – 52 “Let us, at the outset, be content with the simple claim that Jamini Roy is the only living painter in a country of four hundred million people who has achieved a really pure and vital intensity of creative expression… It would be wrong to suggest as some critics have done, either in praise or censure, that Jamini Roy was a revivalist. The important point to recognize is that he approached folk-art not as an outsider, but as one who had intimate knowledge and understanding of the living experiences of the people where lay the roots of the folk-culture itself. Leaving aside the question of Jamini Roy’s use of the late Kalighat pat with its suburban coarseness in subject-matter and its tendency towards obesity in line, let us consider the nature of Bengal folk-painting in general. It is of course through formal symbolism and decorative rhythm, and not through representation, that folk painting asserts its vitality and derives its enduring power of communication. Jamini Roy never had to pursue Gauguin’s far-way search for equivalence and symbolism, nor was it necessary for him to study the paintings of Matisse in order to develop an ‘integral vision’. Level surfaces, a central focus, and the flattening-out of design-in-depth are conventional features of Bengal folk-painting. So is the use of pure and positive colours which, for tonality, depend upon the mutual interaction of full-tones and the equalisation of planes. The strong Indian light which helps relief sculpture rather than mural paintings does not encourage the gradation of tones, nor does it support the illusion of aerial perspective... The lonely search for form became for Jamini Roy a great intellectual adventure. No painter, not even Cezanne, has treated his art more seriously; few have sacrificed more to it. His life has been a struggle to achieve integrity in painting, and for this he has endured years of unremitting, often unrewarded labour.” Dey, Bishnu & John Irwin [1944]. Jamini Roy. Calcutta: The Indian Society of Oriental Art [ISOA]; pp.3-19.