Ganesh Pyne

Ganesh Pyne grew up in a crumbling family house on Kabiraj Row in north Calcutta, listening to his grandmother’s folk tales. As a child he came across a drawing by Abanindranath Tagore in the children’s magazine Mouchak and began drawing on his slate for hours. In 1946 his father died, and the family was caught up in the Calcutta riots. He was nine. It never left the work.

He studied at the Government College of Art and Craft, graduating in 1959, and earned his living as a book illustrator and as an animator at Mandar Mullick’s studio. Bhupen Khakhar thought those animation years formed his visual language. Short of money for colours, he made small pen-and-ink drawings.

He began as a watercolourist in the Bengal School manner, then added Rembrandt’s light, Klee’s simplicity and the films of Bergman, Wajda and Fellini, moving to gouache and finally tempera. The result is sometimes called poetic surrealism: ochre, black and blue, with death, pain and solitude as constant themes. The Harbour (1971) and The Assassin (1979), both tempera, date from the decade that made his name.

In the 1970s M. F. Husain named him the best painter in India, and the attention found him. He kept clear of it, showing a few works at a time with the Society of Contemporary Artists; his first solo show came after he turned fifty. Late in life he painted a Mahabharata series about the epic’s people on the edges, Ekalavya and Amba among them, shown in Kolkata in 2010. He died in 2013.