Benode Behari Mukherjee

Benodebehari Mukherjee (Bengali: বিনোদ বিহারী মুখার্জি) (1904 - 1980) was an Indian / Bengali artist. He was born in Behala, Kolkata (then Calcutta) — now in the Indian state of West Bengal. He taught at Visva Bharati University in Santiniketan. Mukherjee was one of the pioneers of Indian modern art, as a painter and as a celebrated muralist. He was one of the earliest artists in modern India to take up mural as a mode of artistic expression, and his murals display a subtle understanding of environmental and architectural nuances.

Life

Born with severe eye problem, being myopic on one eye and blind in the other, he continued to paint and do murals even after he became completely blind at the age of 54 in the year 1957. He was a student of another famous Indian artist Nandlal Bose, and a friend & close associate of Ramkinkar Baij, the celebrated sculptor. As a teacher in Kala-Bhavan, the art faculty of Visva-Bharati University, he inspired many brilliant students over the years, notable among them are painter K.G. Subramanyan [1], sculptor & printmaker Somnath Hore, designer Riten Majumdar and filmmaker Satyajit Ray.

Style

His style was a complex fusion of idioms absorbed from Western modern art and the spirituality of oriental traditions (both Indian and Far-Eastern). Some of his works show a marked influence of Far-Eastern traditions, namely calligraphy and traditional wash techniques of China and Japan. He took lessons in calligraphy from travelling artists from Japan. During 1937-38 he spend his years in Japan with artist such as Toba Sojo. Similarly he also learnt from the Indian miniature painting in the frescoes of Mughal and Rajput periods. Idioms of Western modern art also bore heavily upon his style, as he is often seen to blend Cubist techniques (such as multi-perspective and faceting of planes) to solve problems of space. Above all, his style was celebrated and acclaimed because of the harmonious blend he achieved out of all these different traditions. His grand murals inside the Visva-Bharati campus are testimony to that. In 1948 he went to become director of National Museum of Kathmandu, in Nepal. In the later years he went to Doon valley, where he started an art school but had to discontinue due the financial shortage.

In 1972 Mukherjee's former student at Santiniketan, filmmaker Satyajit Ray, made a documentary film on him titled "The Inner Eye". The film is an intimate investigation of Mukherjee's creative persona and how he copes with his blindness being a visual artist.

Mukherjee's daughter Mrinalini is also an artist.[2].

External links

• exhibition at national gallery of modern art New Delhi
• Versatile genius by Partha Chatterjeeon the centenary year
• on the centenary year
• Remembering an artist of note

• colurs of retina
• Art of Bengal
• at vadodra gallary
• life sketch

Books on Benode

• Chitrakar : the Artist Benodebehari Mukherjee/translated by K. G. Subramanyan. Calcutta, Seagull Books, 2006, xviii, 196 p., ISBN 81-7046-282-7. [3]
• Ajay Sinha, "Against Allegory: Binode Bihari Mukherjee's Medieval Saints at Shantiniketan," in Richard Davis, ed., Picturing the Nation: Iconographies of Modern India (Hyderabad: Orient Longman 2007).
• Nemai Ghosh, Ray and the Blind Painter: An Odyssey into the Inner Eye (Kolkata: New Age 2004).
• Author/Editor : Jayanta Chakrabarti, Arun Kumar Nag and R. Sivakumar The Santiniketan Murals Seagull