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“Art is a long, unending dialogue with oneself.”
- GANESH PYNE

Having enrolled at the Government Art College, Calcutta, in 1954, Ganesh Pyne joined the rich artistic community that had emerged in Bengal at the time with artists such as Nandalal Bose, Chittaprosad, Somnath Hore, Abanindranath Tagore, Rabindranath Tagore, Chintamoni Kar, then principal of the Art College, and Deb Kumar Roy Chowdhury. He recalled, “The college had... “Art is a long, unending dialogue with oneself.”
- GANESH PYNE

Having enrolled at the Government Art College, Calcutta, in 1954, Ganesh Pyne joined the rich artistic community that had emerged in Bengal at the time with artists such as Nandalal Bose, Chittaprosad, Somnath Hore, Abanindranath Tagore, Rabindranath Tagore, Chintamoni Kar, then principal of the Art College, and Deb Kumar Roy Chowdhury. He recalled, “The college had a rich library, which I mined for art books, spending all my spare hours looking at images of famous people. This was a comfort to me-also exciting. This is how I learnt about art.” (Artist quoted in “Ganesh Pyne in Conversation With Sona Datta,” Rob Dean and Giles Tillotson eds., Modern Indian Painting: Jane & Kito de Boer Collection, Ahmedabad: Mapin Publishing, 2019, p. 207)

The present lot is a sketchbook of paintings that Pyne made in 1959 when he was in his fifth year of college. It was around this time that he was first introduced to the works of Paul Klee at a talk on contemporary trends in European art by artist Paritosh Sen. This proved to be a seminal event that shaped his own artistic career. “The discussion on Klee, along with slides of his paintings, left a deep impression on him. Klee’s metaphysical temperament struck a chord in the young artist...They were two artists from two completely different cultures and from completely different time-frames, but their psyches seemed to have been shaped by similar moulds.” (Ella Dutta, “Art College and After”, Sathi Basu ed., Ganesh Pyne: His Life and Times, Kolkata: CIMA, 1998, pp. 34 - 35)

Pyne had been developing his artistic style during this period and reconciling the Western art he was studying with influences from the Bengal School of painting. Like Klee, his personal artistic vision also dwelled on the liminal worlds of memory, fairy tales and myths. The paintings in this sketchbook evoke Klee’s own fantastical, childlike works that were populated by stick figures, fish, moons, and arrows. They simultaneously bear similarities with Rabindranath Tagore’s early works that were filled with animals or imaginary creatures depicted with fluid forms and intense colours. “The two distinct realms of the artistic imagination-Eastern and Western-held sway in the young painter’s mind, creating within him a strange kind of tension. Oddly enough, as opposed to the work he did in class, the paintings he worked on in solitude at home would reveal, for the most part, elements of folklore and mythology.” (Shiladitya Sarkar, “The House on Kaviraj Row”, Thirst of a Minstrel: The Life and Times of Ganesh Pyne, New Delhi: Rupa & Co., p. 23)

These paintings also offer a glimpse into Pyne’s fertile imagination which he drew upon to create allegorical worlds populated by mysterious characters and symbolism in his later works. The stories that his grandmother narrated to him as a child had a hold on his inner world well into adulthood. “Pyne’s grandmother drew on the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, and on that syncretic Bengali folklore of the bauls, fakirs and pirs, which weaves together Hindu and Islamic narratives...Pyne’s characters do not deny their associations with other, parallel imaginative enterprises; instead, they celebrate such connotative hybridity. ‘My compositions are almost like theatre,’ reflects the artist…” (Ranjit Hoskote, “Reflections on the Art of Ganesh Pyne,” Ganesh Pyne: A Pilgrim in the Dominion of Shadows, Mumbai: Galerie 88, 2005, pp. 8 - 9)

Pyne continued to maintain sketchbooks as he matured as an artist. His drawings in these books- or “jottings” as he referred to them-eventually became like blueprints that he used to map out the structure of his paintings. The artist once remarked, “In earlier days, the idea would come to my mind first. Then I would search for the forms, sketching and sketching. Now, the store of my mind has become richer, with age. When I sit down with my paper, I make ‘jottings’, which are preparatory work. I make different versions of an image, and then translate the one I like best into tempera on canvas.” (Artist quoted in Hoskote, p. 14)

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