It is a rare privilege for Calcuttans to find an exhibition as beautifully put together as the retrospective of the late Suranjan Basu (1957-2002) at the Seagull Arts and Media Resource Centre and 46, Satish Mukherjee Road (till November 30). This scrupulously curated project does full justice to the calibre of an artist like Basu, whose art evolved subtly and imperceptibly over many years. Basu’s technical excellence as a printmaker makes his work accessible to viewers, but without a sense of chronology, it is difficult to appreciate the circuitous, even unpredictable, journey of his eye, and the richly layered history of emotions that informed his aesthetics.

Trained at Santiniketan and Baroda, Basu’s mature work embodies a synthesis of the best of both schools. The nudes and portraits in pastel and ink from the 1970s are purely academic exercises, executed with self-conscious perfectionism. The minimalist geometric shapes of this period, floating in space or resting on one another, are experiments with different media. Basu gave a generic title, Planar Construction, to describe these quaint little ‘essays’ (a convention he followed throughout his career) in spray-painting, etching, lithograph and serigraph. As a student at Visva-Bharati, Basu discovered the German artist, Käthe Kollwitz, came under the influence of Somnath Hore, and opted for printmaking — a providential combination that steered him away from abstract pensées to other kinds of formalist thought-exercises.

Evidently, Hore and his wife, Reba, were crucial to Basu’s ‘sentimental education’. It was Somnath who awakened Basu’s insatiably probing sensibility to the secret potentials of woodcut and gave him a visual language to explore the mystery of the human form. In his exquisite terracotta sculptures — as in the thief caught by a policeman (picture, left) — Basu shows the unmistakable mark of the terracotta miniatures of Reba Hore. There are direct allusions to Somnath, as in the huge woodcut, Beggar Family (1984), depicting a haggard father, a naked little boy, a shrivelled mother with her baby, and a stray dog sitting with the demeanour of a family pet: an ideal family portrait laced with bitter irony. Sketchy History I-IV and History desired, history lived I-VIII, although arranged like two series, demand to be seen as composite narratives of the toil and trouble of the working classes. These may, in a limited sense, be called ‘propagandist art’, but it would be wrong to emphasize the tag too much. To reduce Basu’s realism (or Hore’s social engagement) to being ‘politically motivated’ is to miss the deeper mysteries of their art.

Both Basu and Hore show the body in its iconic doubleness: individuals may suffer alone their uniquely personal tragedies, yet grief, pain and mortality remain universal. So the body is one and many at once. Basu probes the mortal questions by revisiting scenes of death; each time, he focuses on the face of the dying and the loved ones clutching on to their last moments of togetherness. The dark rooms, the crumpled sheets and the mourners are distinct in their appearance, but what one is left with in the end is an overarching and unifying sense of loss.

Basu’s late style, with its root in the murals of Benodebehari Mukherjee and caricatures of Gaganendranath Tagore, is inflected by the genius of the late Bhupen Khakhar and the vividly realized street scenes of Sudhir Patwardhan. In Samasya, another cluster of images identified by a generic name, the men, women and animals resemble the inhabitants of the mystical world of Khakhar’s art, with just the hint of the gritty realism of Patwardhan.

The two multi-panelled etchings in this series, each 40”x40”, hold a dizzying array of faces, trapped in their self-contained, claustrophobic frames. Each group, though engaged in its personal chores, overlap, intertwine and spill into the neighbouring group. A mother and her child look out of one frame, but the child’s hand extends into the frame below, dangling a dead or a sleeping monkey by its tail. Basu’s ‘samasyas’ are thus problems of interconnectedness, resulting in a quest for the common thread running through various forms of life. In the series of woodcut portraits of different social stereotypes — writer, sadhu, artist, social butterfly (picture, right) — called Angutha Chhaap (2000), the thumbprint of the artist on all the images becomes that vital thread.