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. MenonÂ’s interest in these pilgrims stems from both a sense of admiration and from her view of their devotional act as an unbroken bridge linking IndiaÂ’s 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.)
While one would have to be remarkably prudish to find Husain’s ‘Bharat Mata’ offensive, some of his other works are intentionally provocative; I’m thinking here of his depictions of goddesses engaged in copulation with animals. Menon’s work doesn’t really seem like ‘radical interpretations of Hindu religious icons’ to me – judging from the links above, they don’t deviate from standard Hindu iconography all that much. I don’t find it surprising that her work hasn’t attracted the sort of controversy that Husain’s has.
Amba, yes, that’s true about some of Husain’s paintings: there is a difference between simple nudity and representations of sexual acts. But people have been going after him for simple nudity as much as for the more provocative paintings.
Actually, Ennis did a good post on this just three months ago (I probably should have linked to it earlier — oh well). I was thinking specifically of the Bharat Mata painting in this case, since it was in the news again last week.
While none of Menon’s paintings have adult Hindu icons in the nude, they do seem pretty ‘secular’. Her abstract lingam sculptures for instance… And what do you make of this painting (“Mata”)?
Had no idea Menon was of mixed parentage.
Amardeep,
The painting you posted a link to above made me think of this right away: ‘The generative capacity of the female’. I am probably way off but I think that she used the almost nude figure to show the birth of ‘shakti’.
Msichana, Why Shakti? I’m seeing Hanuman in the gold paint in the middle, but I’m not making the connection to Shakti.
Im thinking the mata is a collective of all the major matas…. shakti is the larger figure, out of which the bodya dn representations of durga, amba, kali, lakshmi, saraswati originate… if you look at what each of the arms is holding – the lotus is for lakshmi, the conch for someone else, the weapons for durga and kali, the way the figure is seated is teh way amba is on a lion… etc. you think its hanuman from the dark blot that looks liek a nose.
As Aranyi pointed out, what you see that could be Hanuman’s nose is actually a nipple. The many hands and the different objects held in them made me think of ‘Shakti’. I also think that the various Hindu goddesses (the nine worshipped during Navratri) are all various incarnations of Shakti or Mahadurga and that is why the figure in the center seems to be an integration of all.
Anjolie Ela Menon is one of my FAVOURITE painters, so once again, your post made me smile! Thanks again, Amardeep 🙂
As for “Mata”, at first glance, the Hanuman-like features of the smaller figure’s face jumped out at me too (noticed also that the gold stuff quite clearly links into an Om behind her). But what is more interesting to me is something about the larger figure, the one with the tongue protruding like Kali’s (or, with a vagina-like opening below her mouth). Unlike the smaller figure, whose arms are busy with a multiitude of things, only one hand of the larger figure is depicted as carrying something. In fact, only one of her hands is in the canvas at all, and the arm is disattached from the body. This something that she carries is a mystery — a white blob, only vaguley conch-like (but far less so than the conch the smaller figure holds). It’s this white object or space that most intrigues me.
Artist Chitra Ramanathan’s biography at http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2993868/bio