Among the highlights of the Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa this year is “Bhupen in Goa”, an exhibition of artist Bhupen Khakhar curated by artist and friend Ghulam Mohammad Shaikh from the Swaraj Art Archive. In an email interview, Shaikh talks about his curatorial vision, Khakhar’s sense of humor and how his art was a means of self-expression. Excerpts:
Can you share insights into Khakhar’s works at the Swaraj Art Archive and the curatorial approach for this exhibition?
The main reason for curating this exhibition was to present the largest collection of Bhupains in the relatively unknown Swaraj Archives, founded by Vijay Aggarwal. I am not aware of a large private collection of Bhupen’s work, other than the impressive collection of Bhupen’s friend in Washington, Brian Weinstein (about 100 works).
I have selected 164 works from over 207 in the collection, choosing a variety of mediums mastered by Bhupen, including watercolors, drawings, prints, ceramic plates and ceramic sculptures alongside painted accordion pattern books.
A weak man in bed (Credit: Swaraj Art Archive)
My old colleague, artist and ceramist Sukhdev Rathod from Alibaug has worked with me on the exhibition. Large blow-ups of her portraits are made, including those taken by her painter and friend (Swarga) Navroz Contractor (courtesy of Navroz’s partner Deepa Dhanraj). From my memoirs of Bhupen, a booklet named Body has been prepared. In addition, we will digitally reproduce the booklet produced by Bhupen for his exhibition in Delhi in 1972, which brings out his humour. In it he wrote a half-fictional ‘autobiography’, including a photo of him posing with Marianne Niceis, a French girl whom James Bond had come to meet, and other pictures ‘Made for each other’, imitating a toothpaste advertisement.
Were there any works in this collection that surprised you?
There were many wonderful works that I knew, but the pencil-and-color drawings in his early sketchbooks were a discovery. These include early versions of his seminal works such as Janata Watch Repairing (1972), Deluxe Tailors (1972) and Portrait of Salman Rushdie (1995). I plan to include images of these works along with pencil and color sketches. The paintings include an image on a human heart and some glorious watercolors from the Sri Lanka and Thailand series. But most moving is the image of a skeletal man on a bed surrounded by the heads of his friends and lovers, somewhat reminiscent of the great Mughal painting Dying Inayat Khan.
Salman Rushdie (Credit: Swaraj Art Archive)
You played a big role in allowing Khakhar’s mother to go to Baroda to take up art. Can you talk about his early years there?
In Baroda, Bhupen discovered that he was too old to sit with first-year students, but after graduating with a Bachelor of Commerce at the university, he did a Master’s in Art Criticism before entering a chartered accountancy course. were eligible to join the course. So, he joined the course and even wrote a dissertation but then he gave up painting, and painted for more than 40 years until his death in 2003.
You have written how in an attempt to appear straight, Khakhar skillfully played a “double game”, including romancing Nasreen Mohammadi and Geeta Kapoor. Later, he became comfortable expressing his sexuality. How did this change manifest in his work?
Perhaps, this is how he covered up his sexual orientation and it was the pain behind the cover-up that he endured until it came out in the 1980s. In his earlier paintings, he showed his love for the male body in a subtle, rather secretive manner.
Bhupen was also a joke. Are there any memorable moments of mischief?
He liked to play various roles. Perhaps, the most mischievous was the way in which he played a grieving husband with marital and parental woes to some fellow passengers on the train. I found it very difficult to keep a straight face as he recounted his wife’s escape and his children’s tantrums. You were influenced by each other and, at times, even used the same inspiration for different purposes.
In art, we had the usual favorites like cineage painting, a lot of pre-modern Indian painting, but I was less interested in popular ephemera, company paintings and Hindi films; He was completely immersed in them. We often looked at and commented on each other’s work. For our pictorial orientation, we chose different paths but it is possible, sometimes, that our intentions coincide.
Assembly (Radhasoumi) felt pen painting (Credit: Swaraj Art Archives)
In the 80s, when works like Two Men in Banaras, Yayati, were shown behind closed doors in Mumbai, Khakhar expressed his desire to be able to publicly display depictions of same-sex relationships? Did the fact that some artists objected to his work and labeled it “vulgar” bother him?
If he painted Yayati and two men in Benares at his Baroda home in Chikuwadi, which was open to all, it can be assumed that he wanted to show his candid works in public. He was very upset when he heard some Indian artists dubbed his work as obscene. On the contrary, he felt at home in England, where no such questions arose. I remember him talking excitedly about the Mardi Gras festival in Sydney where he exhibited some of his work.
Image in the heart of man; (Credit: Swaraj Art Archives)
Artists often communicate their innermost thoughts through their work. Did Khakhar’s art serve as a uniquely personal vehicle for self-expression, from exploring homosexuality to suffering from prostate cancer?
It is clear that artists express their inner turmoil but such expressions are rarely overt. Although Bhupen made a quality of painting with a frank but often tongue-in-cheek demeanor. He would laugh at both of them, an offer that was extremely rare.
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