Richard Bartholomew, as a compilation of his writings reveals, was an art critic who didn’t let his friendships with the top artists of his time suppress his voice
A
Burmese émigré who had arrived in India in 1942, Richard
Bartholomew entered the literary-cultural scene when
studying English literature at St Stephen’s College, and then as a
teacher of English at Delhi’s Modern School from 1951 to 1958. A
poet and a photographer himself, he started writing and publishing as
an art critic in 1955. From the late 1950s until his tragic and
sudden death from a stroke in 1985, Bartholomew’s was the most
important critical voice on
the Delhi art scene, and he among the most important art critics in
India. From 1977 till 1985, he took on, in addition, the onerous task
of institution building as secretary of the Lalit Kala Akademi.
And
yet, until 2009, when his son Pablo Bartholomew, himself a
photographer, put his photographs together in a show and a book
called The
Critic’s Eye,
Richard Bartholomew’s was not a name I knew. The Art
Critic,
self-published by Pablo after a difficult, muddled, often painful
process that ended up taking 27 years (and which he gives partial
voice to in a remarkably honest afterword), finally brings to a
contemporary readership a definitive collection of Richard
Bartholomew’s critical writings. Voluminous at roughly 200,000
words (edited down from the original 300,000), this is an ‘art
book’ like no other.
Opinionated, often provocative, but always
thoughtful, Bartholomew’s writing has the rare virtue of combining
the survey and the longue
durée with
a marvellous immediacy, giving the present-day reader a privileged
sense of modern Indian art ‘as it happened’.
The
liveliness of his prose is also based on his ability to straddle
worlds: while treating art with all the seriousness of a national
mission, he constantly strives to translate what is essentially high
culture into something that ordinary people—middle and upper
middle-class readers of The
Indian Express or
The Times of India or Thought magazine—ought
to be able to connect with, enjoy, and even if possible own. Sample:
‘The best thing about… ‘Graphic Workshop 1974’, organized in
Baroda, is that each print has been brought out in a small edition of
50… [enabling work to be priced] at Rs 50 which is the price of a
whiskey bottle or a cotton sari.’
It
is a sensibility that can only have come from a critic who was on
familiar, if not intimate, terms with many players in the art
world—and yet wrote about it not for the coffee-table book or the
rarefied academic volume but for the educated layperson. And also,
perhaps, only from an art world still un-feted (and un-buffeted) by
the market; Richard’s writing, writes Geeta Kapur, ‘matured on a
typewriter in modest dwellings that neighboured the artists’
equally modest studio-apartments’.
Bartholomew
himself saw his role with fierce clarity. ‘The critic who wishes to
be articulate must be prepared to discuss reviews with artists; he
must be at home in the artist’s studio and he must be an integral
part of the art movement. If there is no art movement, he must try to
foster one,’ he wrote in Cultural
Forum in
1959. ‘It is imperative that he should have the respect of three
institutions: (1) the public; (2) the artist; (3) the editor. This
triple test disqualifies many for the vocation of criticism, for
criticism is a supreme test of integrity.’
The
book provides ample evidence that Richard held himself to these
standards. He was close to several of the painters he wrote about—Ram
Kumar, whom Richard and his wife Rati (then Batra) befriended at St
Stephen’s College; Kanwal Krishna, having taught alongside him at
Modern School (where Geeta Kapur first encountered the two of them as
teachers and whose art room Krishna ‘treated for all the world like
an artist’s atelier and evening hub’), and his wife, the artist
and printmaker Devyani Krishna; A Ramachandran, who remembers Richard
and Rati arriving at his barsati door to invite him and wife for
dinner at their place, also in Jangpura; MF Husain; and Satish
Gujral. And yet these are artists whose work received Richard’s
most scrupulous honesty. Sample three statements on Husain’s
paintings: in 1961 Richard can write, ‘As my acquaintance with
Husain grows I begin to marvel at his virtuosity. Husain is a
careless painter often; he is a facile painter sometimes; but Husain
is a painter with a carefully selected repertoire, always.’ In
1965, he can write, ‘The 23 Husain drawings in this exhibition are
good drawing-room pieces.’ And in a long essay on Husain published
in a 1972 volume, he can make the following marvellous observation:
‘Men put so much energy into words, even if they do not believe all
that is said. Husain puts that energy into paint.’
The
integrity that Bartholomew brought to his work drew reactions in kind
from the artists themselves. Here is Richard writing about Satish
Gujral: ‘And when I criticised him for the want of finesse and
conviction in the lettering and the slogans of his terracotta pieces
of 1969-70, he had the heart and the good sense to take it in his
stride, though it hurt. “A man doesn’t do what he has succeeded
in doing all the time,” [he said].’
He
draws analogies and references from far afield, from literature and
poetry most of all, but also in vivid prose, from the natural and
cultural environment of his adoptive country. Here he is on Raza’s
Indian palette: ‘His colours are those of the Banaras brocade, the
Gujarati manuscript, the blazing intensity of the Indian summer with
its glory of the gulmohur and the laburnum.’ Reading Richard’s
writing, in fact, one has not the slightest sense of the outsider’s
trepidation, or desire not to offend.
On the contrary, one is
pleasantly surprised by the forthright way in which he broaches, for
instance, such presumably sensitive subjects as Bengali dominance. In
a 1959 piece called ‘Art in the Shadow of Official Patronage’, he
took the Lalit Kala Akademi to task for several things, including its
institution of a tripartite division of art submissions for a prize
into ‘oriental, academic-realistic, and modern’. ‘Manifestly
this is a move to provide sanction to the decadent and dying Bengal
School, for which Mr Barada Ukil, the Secretary, and Mr DP Roy
Chowdhury, the Chairman, must necessarily have much sentimental
attachment… it is pertinent to point out that three centres of art
instruction in this country are being managed by Bengali artists, by
Mr BC Sanyal in Delhi, Mr Bishwanath Mukerji in Hyderabad, and by Mr
Chintamani Kar in Calcutta. The Curator of the National Gallery of
Modern Art, Mr Pradosh Das Gupta, is also a Bengali. For better or
for worse, there is the influence of Bengalis at the top official
places in Indian art today. The general ambivalence, therefore, is
understandable.’
And
yet, there is no slanderous gossip here, no personal slurs. What
there is is a deep-rooted, not always rational, distaste for the
‘nostalgia’ and ‘romanticism’ of the Bengal School. But even
this avowed critical disdain for nostalgia and romanticism is never
allowed to swamp his instinctively positive response to a body of
work. About Amrita Sher-Gil, for example, he writes with empathy
rather than dismissal: ‘The pensively stanced figures of the
countryside in a Sher-Gil painting breathe a romanticism that is born
of the regret that these things were passing away.’
It
is impossible to do justice to this vast volume in a short review.
But suffice it to say that Bartholomew is attentive to the smallest
detail in a work of art, writing passionately about colour and light
and form, the stroke that creates the hunch of a back—while never
shying away from the big picture questions that you almost rarely
hear asked anymore: Is modern Indian art merely imitative of Western
art? What does its Indianness consist of? What is the role of State
patronage? You may or may not agree with his answers, but it is more
than sufficient pleasure to discover so fine an interlocutor—and
one you did not know existed.
Published in Open magazine, 20 Oct 2012.
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