K. G. Subramanyan

Kalpathi Ganpathi Subramanyan was born in 1924 in Kuthuparamba, in Kerala, and first studied economics at Presidency College, Madras. As a Gandhian in the freedom movement he was jailed and then barred from government colleges. In 1944 he went to Kala Bhavana at Santiniketan and studied there until 1948 under Nandalal Bose, Benode Behari Mukherjee and Ramkinkar Baij.

In 1951 he joined the young Faculty of Fine Arts at Baroda, where he taught for most of the next three decades, as lecturer, professor of painting and dean. His students included Bhupen Khakhar, Gulammohammed Sheikh, Jyoti Bhatt, Mrinalini Mukherjee, Nilima Sheikh and Vivan Sundaram. He also spent years as a design adviser to the All India Handloom Board.

He tried every medium that would hold an idea: small terracotta reliefs, large murals, reverse painting on glass, children’s books he wrote and illustrated himself, among them When God First Made the Animals He Made Them All Alike. His paintings draw on Kerala folk art, Kalighat painting and the pattachitra of Bengal and Odisha, on Indian court painting and, steadily, on Cubism. In the 1960s he painted mostly still lifes; in the 1970s came the Terrace series.

In 1980 he went back to Kala Bhavana to teach, and from 1990 painted large black-and-white murals on its walls. His essays on Indian art include Moving Focus and The Living Tradition. The National Gallery of Modern Art held his largest retrospective, curated by R. Siva Kumar. He received the Padma Vibhushan in 2012 and died in Baroda in 2016.