Bhupen Khakhar

Bhupen Khakhar was born in Bombay in 1934 into a family of artisans who had come from Diu. He was the first of them to go to university, and at the family’s insistence he also qualified as a chartered accountant. He kept the profession for years, as a partner in a firm in Baroda, and painted in his spare time.

In 1958 he met the painter and poet Gulammohammed Sheikh, who encouraged him to visit the new Faculty of Fine Arts in Baroda. Khakhar was largely self-taught, but the Baroda circle became his own. His first exhibited works were images of gods cut from popular prints and stuck onto mirrors, with scribbles and gestural marks on top. He came to be called India’s first Pop artist.

He turned to oil and to ordinary men: the barber, the watch repairer, an assistant accountant he worked with, each set in a small shop painted with real care.

You Can’t Please All (1981) shows a naked man, almost life size, on a balcony, watching the father, son and donkey of Aesop’s fable wind through an Indian town below. It is widely read as his coming out. After it, desire between men became an open subject in his work at a time when it was rarely spoken of in India. Tate acquired the painting in 1996 and named its 2016 retrospective after it.

In the 1990s he worked more in watercolour. He received the Padma Shri in 1984 and the Prince Claus Award in 2000, and died in Baroda in 2003.