Hindustan Times ·
Drawing Room: Yasha Shrivastava on Bhupen Khakhar’s polarising art
Not everyone understood Bhupen Khakhar’s work. Beneath the bright pop colours and everyday scenes were subjects that polite society preferred not to see
Few Indian artists have been as polarising as Bhupen Khakhar. When the self-taught painter and writer from Mumbai who died in 2003, had a massive retrospective of his work at the Tate Museum in London in 2016, it set off a bomb in the art world. The Guardian published an unfavourable review of the show, dismissing Khakhar’s work as “old-fashioned” and “second-rate”, his figures “too sloppily drawn to be engaging”. It prompted Indian artists and critics to rustle up an affronted defence. Khakhar, they said, possessed a unique, creative and forward-thinking artistic outlook. The show’s title: You Can’t Please All. Fitting.
And yet, Khakhar’s work – he started painting in the 1960s and is considered India’s first pop artist – is hard to ignore. It brings personal experience, everyday life, sexuality, taboos and the human body into the story of Indian art, and often does so with jaunty exuberant humour. In one work, figures might be calmly bathing in a sea of vivid, almost comical colours, in another a man might be getting a haircut at the barber’s, in yet another, there’s just a watchmaker peering into his loupe in his stall. But several will also feature nudes and explicit homosexual encounters.
