The Art of the Ominous: Bikash Bhattacharjee’s Artworks

Bikash Bhattacharjee, fondly called Bikash Babu, was an artist known for his unapologetic portrayal of the social and political scenario. This is the tale of the artist whose raw paintings have a discomforting and uneasy air around them.

(Bikash Bhattacharya at his studio, Image source - The heritage lab)

One of India's gems in terms of surreal painters, Bikash Bhattacharjee was born in Kolkata in 1940. Inclined towards art from a young age, he graduated from the Indian College of Arts and Draftsmanship, Kolkata in 1963. Bikash Bhattacharjee gathered his visual and intellectual ideals from the politically charged atmosphere of Calcutta of the Forties after his family had settled there. In 1973, Bhattacharjee began teaching at the Government College of Arts and Crafts and taught there till 1982. The artist worked with many mediums - oil on canvas, tempera, oil on board, pastels on board, watercolour, crayon and pencil.

Bhattacharjee was a prolific realistic painter. His works were inspired by his early childhood, the rooftops and alleyways of North Kolkata where he lived, the crumbling walls of buildings and the people from his environment. His subjects were portraits of people from a politically charged atmosphere of Kolkata and representative of their class. They included depictions of the female form, people of all ages and situations, old men and women, children, and even domestic help. He could create an authentic milieu as a background to the characters heightened the drama. Realism being Bhattacharjee's forte, he explores the possibilities of oil as a medium to the extent that he could depict the exact quality of drapery or the skin tone of a woman and capture the light perfectly.

He made art that was an instrument of aesthetic and social critique; in his prime, his paintings were a window into the struggles of poverty and socio-economic unrest that surrounded him. In the late 1960s to early 1970s, Bhattacharjee created a series of surreal paintings, with a subtext of the demonic or subhuman in a setting of either dark fantasy or comic drama. At a time when most artists tended towards abstraction and distortion, he contributed towards reviving realism.

One of his most iconic works is the Doll Series where Bhattacharjee paints a forgotten and forlorn doll discarded as cruelly as the crumpled paper next to her. The doll is sitting by the ominous dark mass of the city and streets into which its absent owner has disappeared. It acts as a silent witness to Bengal's Naxalite movement, blending menace and innocence.

The main idea revolved around placing not a human figure but a baby doll as the central motif of the desolate cityscape soaked with the terror of political violence. As a result, every picture arouses feelings of innocence and terror, helplessness and violence, with the master juxtaposition of living human presence and lifeless ambience.

Later on, Bhattacharjee collaborated with writer Samaresh Bose and illustrated a fictionalized biography of artist Ram Kinkar Baij. The project remained incomplete due to Bose's sudden death.

He received numerous awards including those from the Academy of Fine Art, Kolkata, in 1962, the Birla Academy of Art and Culture, Kolkata, and the Lalit Kala Akademi National Award in New Delhi. He was awarded the Bangla Ratna by the state government and the Padma Shri by the Indian government in 1988. Through his oil and pastel paintings, Bhattacharjee made a mark in realism and paved the way for artists to come.

(Violence of Calcutta portrayed through the doll series, Image source - Google images)