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Lot Essay
In the lower half of the present lot, a dense crowd of bodies presses towards the viewer. Their faces are ashen and grey, their eyes hollowed so only dark shadows remain, their expressions blank and lifeless. Some face forward, while others look up, turning towards the white mist that bisects the surface and appears to consume one of the figures, who is slowly disintegrating into the haze. Above the mist, two disembodied hands float, seeming to reach for a shiny red balloon above them. The color of the balloon is a vivid shock against the muted, almost monochromatic palette of the rest of the composition. It demands attention, yet many of the denizens of the painting appear unaware of its presence, obliviously moving forward.
As a subject, the balloon extends Bikash Bhattacharjee’s career-long fascination with the symbols (and horrors) of childhood, which may be traced back to his early series of Doll paintings. In the early 1970s, several acts of political violence rocked Calcutta, the artist’s home. During this period, a young girl asked Bhattacharjee to repair and repaint her doll, leading him to consider the symbolic potential of this toy and others to interpret the violent instability in his city. Bhattacharjee’s use of dolls and balloons is possibly also related to his own turbulent childhood, which was marked by his father’s death and the socioeconomic problems that plagued Bengal following India’s independence. His resulting series of Doll paintings led to early acclaim, cementing Bhattacharjee’s reputation as a master of the macabre and surreal.
The unsettling quality of Untitled (Red Balloon) is only heightened by Bhattacharjee’s meticulous attention to detail. This is particularly notable at a time when his peers were rejecting academic painting and the Bengal School, preferring to experiment with the forms of European modernism. As Partha Mitter noted, “The hyper-realism of the Calcutta artist Bikash Bhattacharjee [...] swims against the tide of fashion in India. There is an undercurrent of violence in his work [...] These scary aliens that inhabit the twilight world seem to emanate from the slums of Calcutta” (P. Mitter, Indian Art, Oxford, 2001, pp. 221-222). Like Raja Ravi Varma before him, Bhattacharjee skillfully translated Indian experience into oil painting, often drawing on the high drama and rich emotion of European Old Masters like Peter Paul Rubens, Rembrandt, and Johannes Vermeer. In his writing, Bhattacharjee also cited the importance of later artists like Edgar Degas, Kathe Kollwitz, and most importantly Andrew Wyeth, whose painting Christina’s World introduced Bhattacharjee to the possibility of portraying complex psychological states through detailed realism.
Although Bhattacharjee employs a Renaissance-style eye for detail, he deviates from Renaissance artists in one key feature: the faces of his figures. While Renaissance artists typically valorized the human figure and face, Bhattacharjee’s distortions deliberately subvert this tradition, representing the face as haunted or grotesque. This choice is especially evident in the present lot, where he paints the hands with extraordinary realism while rendering the faces as sallow, unreal, and zombie-like in their blankness. By distorting and manipulating features, Bhattacharjee undermines any sense of agency or individuality in his figures, rendering them a faceless mob, victims of a psychological violence that appears throughout his oeuvre.
The artist’s psychological acuity is a result of his sharp political awareness and lifelong concern with portraying social realities. Though Bhattacharjee rejected specific labels, his work reveals a profound sensitivity to the relationship between the art historical, the psychological, and the political. He “is an impartial observer of the human condition that surrounds him. These observations are rendered in the simple but forcefully direct language of a consummate artist – a language understood by all” (P. Sen, Visions: Paintings and Sculptures by Somnath Hore, Ganesh Pyne, Bikash Bhattacharjee, and Jogen Chowdhury, Kolkata, 1986, p. 98).
As a subject, the balloon extends Bikash Bhattacharjee’s career-long fascination with the symbols (and horrors) of childhood, which may be traced back to his early series of Doll paintings. In the early 1970s, several acts of political violence rocked Calcutta, the artist’s home. During this period, a young girl asked Bhattacharjee to repair and repaint her doll, leading him to consider the symbolic potential of this toy and others to interpret the violent instability in his city. Bhattacharjee’s use of dolls and balloons is possibly also related to his own turbulent childhood, which was marked by his father’s death and the socioeconomic problems that plagued Bengal following India’s independence. His resulting series of Doll paintings led to early acclaim, cementing Bhattacharjee’s reputation as a master of the macabre and surreal.
The unsettling quality of Untitled (Red Balloon) is only heightened by Bhattacharjee’s meticulous attention to detail. This is particularly notable at a time when his peers were rejecting academic painting and the Bengal School, preferring to experiment with the forms of European modernism. As Partha Mitter noted, “The hyper-realism of the Calcutta artist Bikash Bhattacharjee [...] swims against the tide of fashion in India. There is an undercurrent of violence in his work [...] These scary aliens that inhabit the twilight world seem to emanate from the slums of Calcutta” (P. Mitter, Indian Art, Oxford, 2001, pp. 221-222). Like Raja Ravi Varma before him, Bhattacharjee skillfully translated Indian experience into oil painting, often drawing on the high drama and rich emotion of European Old Masters like Peter Paul Rubens, Rembrandt, and Johannes Vermeer. In his writing, Bhattacharjee also cited the importance of later artists like Edgar Degas, Kathe Kollwitz, and most importantly Andrew Wyeth, whose painting Christina’s World introduced Bhattacharjee to the possibility of portraying complex psychological states through detailed realism.
Although Bhattacharjee employs a Renaissance-style eye for detail, he deviates from Renaissance artists in one key feature: the faces of his figures. While Renaissance artists typically valorized the human figure and face, Bhattacharjee’s distortions deliberately subvert this tradition, representing the face as haunted or grotesque. This choice is especially evident in the present lot, where he paints the hands with extraordinary realism while rendering the faces as sallow, unreal, and zombie-like in their blankness. By distorting and manipulating features, Bhattacharjee undermines any sense of agency or individuality in his figures, rendering them a faceless mob, victims of a psychological violence that appears throughout his oeuvre.
The artist’s psychological acuity is a result of his sharp political awareness and lifelong concern with portraying social realities. Though Bhattacharjee rejected specific labels, his work reveals a profound sensitivity to the relationship between the art historical, the psychological, and the political. He “is an impartial observer of the human condition that surrounds him. These observations are rendered in the simple but forcefully direct language of a consummate artist – a language understood by all” (P. Sen, Visions: Paintings and Sculptures by Somnath Hore, Ganesh Pyne, Bikash Bhattacharjee, and Jogen Chowdhury, Kolkata, 1986, p. 98).