A solo exhibit by Indian Painter Anjolie Ela Menon is up at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, Artdaily reports. Menon is a Delhi-based painter of mixed American and Indian heritage. She was born in 1940 and studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris as well as at the J.J. School of Art in Bombay (which she did not like!). Menon has had an active and successful career, winning many awards, including India’s prestigious Padma Shri.
In the exhibit are ten major paintings as well as a large a triptych called “Yatra,” which you can see in small form here. See if you can rectify the painting itself with the explanation offered in Artdaily:
This triptych depicts various figures that can be identified as participants in a particularly well-known north Indian Hindu pilgrimage, or yatra. Menons interest in these pilgrims stems from both a sense of admiration and from her view of their devotional act as an unbroken bridge linking Indias ancient past with its rapidly modernizing present. (link)
(Incidentally, the image on the right is a portrait of Menon I found on the Flickr site of a brilliant photographer calling herself “50mm.” Check out the rest of 50mm’s amazing photos here.)
In this interview, Menon acknowledges the influence of both M.F. Husain and Amrita Sher-Gil, India’s two best known post-Independence painters. Husain is constantly in trouble with either conservative Hindus or conservative Muslims, while Menon seems to have avoided controversy. It’s interesting, because many of Menon’s recent paintings and sculptures do employ religious themes. There is a beautiful glass sculpture of Ganesha here, and sculptures of baby Krishna here. To me, the fact that these radical interpretations of Hindu religious icons are inoffensive, while Husain’s “Bharat Mata” is censored just exposes the confusion about what constitutes an offensive image in India.
In a recent defense of Husain, Uma Nair describes the symbolism of the nude body in Husain’s paintings, and makes an important point about censorship:
We Indians are a queer lot - while advertisers and media become ever more daring, or desperate, for attention-grabbing images, art has been reduced to deciphering its references for diatribes. The nude for Husain is a collective celebration of the human form, its life force triumphant over its very evident mortality.
Art is about differentiating between true art and tawdry eroticism. (link)
This kind of basic differentiation of genres is exactly what the anti-Husain legions are unable to do. Fortunately, Anjolie Ela Menon has escaped all this, and I only hope she continues to get international recognition without the usual attendant headaches.
You can see more of Anjolie Ela Menon’s paintings here. (Indeed, there are hundreds of her paintings on the internet; you only have to look.)
