In the year of centenaries, KNMA in Delhi brings the works of Mohan Samant, the unsung master of Progressive Artists’ Group, back into spotlight with a seminal exhibition, ‘Magic in the Square’
In this year of centenaries vital to Indian modern art, a name that was almost forgotten is that of Mohan Samant (1924-2004), the Bombay-born artist who made New York his home and was an important member of the second generation of Progressive Artists’ Group, along with V. S. Gaitonde and Krishen Khanna. In fact, but for his centenary, chances are that Samant may have continued to remain glorious in his artistic practice on the sidelines of all the upheavals that mark the Indian modern art scene today.
His centenary exhibition, ‘Magic in the Square’, which opened recently at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) in New Delhi, therefore, is one of the most seminal exhibitions of this calendar year anywhere in the country. It retrains the spotlight on an artist, who for various reasons, largely remained outside the exhibition circuit in the land of his birth, especially after permanently making New York his home in the 1960s, even though he never personally severed ties with it.
It was not uncommon among his generation of Indian modern artists to relocate to important art capitals abroad but unlike S. H. Raza, and F. N. Souza, for example, Samant remained withdrawn from the Indian exhibition scene, especially until the 1990s, even as he continued to court success on the international stage. This has resulted in near total loss of his presence in the minds of art lovers in contemporary India.
‘Magic in the Square’ carries enormous weight as it brings a rare opportunity to see a sizable number of works by an artist who has been famously described by cultural theorist Ranjit Hoskote as “the missing link in the evolutionary narrative of contemporary art of India.”
It was with this sense of gravity that I approached the KNMA exhibition, preparing myself to be overwhelmed by a show the likes of which have not been seen by my generation of aesthetes. “Not just your generation but several generations of art lovers haven’t seen a Mohan Samant show,” says Roobina Karode, director and chief curator at KNMA. “It is not known why people wrote less and less of him, and why India saw less and less of his art works even though he was successful internationally. I had read about him since my student days and the fact that he had been overlooked, had remained in my mind for a long time. In 2014-15, his wife Jillian Samant came to KNMA and soon gifted four of his works to the museum. We later acquired some of his works. So, the idea of this exhibition was germinating in my mind for a while and the centenary seemed a befitting time to mount this show,” adds Karode.
That makes ‘Magic in the Square’ one of the highlights of this especially significant year, 2024, which marks the centenary of quite a few other masters of Indian modern art, such as K. G. Subramanyan, F. N. Souza, Ram Kumar, V. S. Gaitonde, and another overlooked artist, Arup Das.
Detail from Three Women, 1981, Oilstick and paper cutouts on board, Collection: Kiran Nadar Museum of Art
The vocabulary of his art
The artist was born as Manmohan Balkrishna Samant in Bombay (now Mumbai) to a homemaker mother and a father who was a high school principal and an English teacher. Samant began working as a clerk for a British oil company but quit that soon to join Sir J. J. School of Art in Bombay, where Akbar Padamsee, Ambadas Khobragade and Tyeb Mehta were his classmates. He received his diploma in 1952 and the same year became a member of the most prominent art group of its time, the Progressive Artists’ Group, even though two of its founders, Souza and Raza, had already left India for the UK and France respectively by then.
Soon thereafter, Samant won several awards that established him as a promising, upcoming artist. These included the Governor’s Prize, and gold medals by the Bombay Art Society and Calcutta Art Society. In 1957, he went to Rome on an Italian government scholarship for two years and in 1959, to the US on Rockefeller Fund fellowship, where he remained until 1964. He settled in New York in 1968, where he would marry musician Jillian Saunders in 1971. He continued to grow as an artist internationally, and a few years before his passing in 2004, was conferred with the Asian American Heritage Award for lifetime achievement in the arts. He remained a lifelong player of the Sarangi, a bowed string instrument.
Given the trajectory of Samant’s career, the visual language of his art was heavily dominated by an enquiry into the possibilities with the figure, which he explored in an abstractionist language. He distorted the figure in a unique way and placed it within his picture frame in a manner that made it engage with the other abstract elements profoundly. In doing so, he became a representative of his age, marked by a novel and spirited artistic enquiry by a young band of Indian artists, decidedly set on exploring a pathbreaking language for modern Indian art.
His fascination with magic
What set Samant’s art apart was its timelessness. It spoke not just to contemporary times but to generations gone by, from the immediate past to ancient times. It was common for him to use contemporary materials such as paper cutouts and metal wires to create a picture evoking civilisations of yore, expressed through skeletons and other symbols from archaeology. For instance, in a 1994 work at the ongoing show, Masked Dance for the Ancestors, Samant places a human skeleton in a top corner, lying partially exposed in its grave, which seems to have been dug up at an archaeological site. In other parts of the same canvas are more contemporary figures, and the juxtaposition of all of these creates a communication between different epochs.
Celebration of the Dead, 1987, Acrylic, oil, sand, spackle and wire on canvas, Collection: KNMA
Similar skeletons appear in other works such as Descending Angels and Celebration of the Dead. Says Karode, “Samant travelled extensively within India and abroad, visiting ancient civilisations and exploring the questions of birth and death. He explored questions for which science has no answers, which lie in the realm of magic. It was through the idea of magic that he was able to build links between the present and past, between the familiar and unfamiliar.”
In an interview to the Time magazine in March 1964, Samant had said: “I believe that a great work of art is timeless. I always felt at one with things that have a sense of remoteness, which is one reason why I like sarangi — from a short distance it sounds like music from thousands of years ago.” Therefore, he sought inspiration from the paleolithic cave paintings at Lascaux in France, Sumerian tablets, and Egyptian murals. Even at prominent NY museums, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he would seek out African and Egyptian galleries. Figures inspired by these geographies and epochs appear liberally on canvases on display at the KNMA exhibition.
This wide range of inspiration also ensured that Samant was able to use a wide range of materials as well in his art. Karode explains, “He shuttles between media — charcoal, paint, graphite, metal wires, paper cutouts, all at the same time. The early works were not so richly layered as the later ones; the latter show layer after layer as the artist has created dimensions of all kinds, quite like folk art of India. That is why, at the exhibition, we have given an entire list of materials that Samant used.” The paper cutout works, in fact, allude to the possibility of Samant getting inspired by the French artist Henri Matisse (1869-1954), who began creating decoupage or paper collages in the 1940s when a surgery rendered him unable to paint or make sculptures.
His place in Indian modern art
Samant remains a vital pillar of the very important early years of Indian modernism, in the first half of the twentieth century. In his individuated exploration of modernism, where abstraction was used as an ally of an exalted figure, he created a vocabulary that was unique and pathbreaking. In a reflection of the zeitgeist of the times, he worked freely, disrupting established conventions.
Says Karode, “Most of the artists were generally loyal to the mediums they had been made to master, but Samant was the opposite. He was disruptive in his choice of material, put discordant things together and enjoyed the play between line, surface and structure, which created a stunning effect on his canvases.” His works need to be studied and focused upon for the contribution he thus made to Indian modernism with his bold experiments. She adds, “It’s a point of intrigue that while there was so much focus on Souza, Raza, Husain, why not on Samant? How could people miss such a creative mind?”
Hopefully, ‘Magic in the Square’ will launch this enquiry into an artist who truly deserves to be studied for the spirit he showed in pushing the envelope of Indian modern art further. As it is on view until September 30, there is ample time for art lovers, not just from NCR, but also from other cities to view the body of Samant’s work on display. And even as one browses through ‘Magic in the Square’, the other ongoing solo, Amitava’s ‘If We Knew the Point’ is another universe altogether, with as many as 150 works providing a window into the lifetime’s work of the 77-year-old New Delhi-based artist.
