Paritosh Sen

Paritosh Sen was born in Dhaka in 1918. His book of autobiographical sketches, Zindabahar, goes back to that childhood in the old city.

He taught art at the Daly College in Indore from 1940, and was a founder member of the Calcutta Group, which did much to bring modernism into Indian art. In 1950 he went to Paris to study, at the Académie André Lhote, the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and the École des Beaux-Arts. In 1953 he went to the Salon de Mai and, the next day, to Picasso’s studio, to show him his own work.

In Paris he absorbed Picasso, Matisse and Brancusi. He kept changing after that: a de Kooning-like expressionism around 1970, a series on a cyclist’s accident in 1973, with a papier-mâché figure of himself on a bicycle, a dhoti-clad politician in the late 1970s, twenty-four paintings on the gospel of Sri Ramakrishna in the early 1980s.

He was never only a painter. In 1962 he designed a Bengali typeface based on Rabindranath Tagore’s handwriting. In 1967 Indira Gandhi unveiled his portrait of Jawaharlal Nehru in Hyderabad. From 1956 he taught layout and design at the Regional Institute of Printing Technology in Jadavpur, held a Rockefeller fellowship in 1970, and showed at the São Paulo Biennale in 1965 and the Havana Biennale in 1986. He died in Kolkata in 2008, aged 90.