Suneet Chopra

The exhibition of the works of Pablo Picasso that opens on December 14 at the National Museum in New Delhi is definitely something to look forward to. Few artists have been able to attract the imagination of younger ones all over the world as Picasso has. In India, his influence is visible in the best of our artists, such as Ram Kinkar Baij, F N Souza, M F Husain, Somenath Hore, Paritosh Sen and K S Kulkarni. His sense of colour and play with form to free it from both academic representation and impressionism and to give it a visual autonomy with his experimental daring remains something that the most ambitious artists strive to emulate even today.

Indeed, his greatness lay in the fact that he understood his times and stood up for his principles in the face of what seemed insurmountable obstacles. He turned his back on imperialism when he sought out ‘savage’ African sculptures, and later Chitpur prints for inspiration to exercise the truly savage culture that the colonising powers put forward as ‘civilisation’. He challenged fascism from the perspective of the working class and began painting his most famous work Guernica, which condemns the bombing of a Basque village of that name by Franco’s and Hitler’s forces, on May Day in 1937. He refused to go to Spain as long as the dictatorship of Franco lasted. And he gave us the image of the Dove of Peace that millions carried on their banners to confront the cold war all over the world and the barbarism of the Vietnam war.

And true to Delhi’s character, Picasso’s influence spreads beyond the National Museum with Delhi giving it its own flavour. There is an exhibition of Souza’s work of the 1950s and 1960s at the Kumar Gallery at Sainik Farms, which is an important exhibition to see a kindred spirit in more senses than one of Picasso. His capacity to synthesise various aspects of the visual is evident in his Striptease works of 1962 and 1963, where a single line drawing of a smiling striptease artist becomes a sharp indictment of voyeurism in oils. But, like Picasso, his critique is devoid of malice, as one can see from his Still Life With Vessels on an altar, of 1962, where he synthesises his feel for colour with his expert handling of line and awakens us to the beauty of genuine spirituality, which one sees in so many of his works on the Crucifixion and the Last Supper.

The real bonanza is, however, for those who would love to afford a Picasso but cannot afford one. The Art Alive Gallery is exhibiting a limited number of reproductionsm which are on canvas and on paper. These reproductions have been done with special permission. Among the works that are notable are the Acrobat on Ball (50.8 cm x 31.4 cm) from the Pushkin Museum in Moscow; The Artist’s Son (50 cm x 68 cm) from the Musee Picasso in Paris; Head of Harlequin (61.6 cm x 46.7 cm) from the National Museum in Prague; Woman With Hat (61.3 cm x 45.1 cm) from the Kunstmuseum, Basel, and Tragedy (63.5 cm x 40.6 cm) from the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, to list only a few of the works available.

These reproductions are selling at prices between Rs 4,000 to Rs 27,000 each. So, Delhi will have done its bit for an artist who was one of the greatest of the twentieth century and whose works deserve to be seen and possessed.