Gobardhan Ash (1907-1996) died in relative obscurity and poverty at Begumpur village in the Hooghly district of Bengal. But going by the number of his exhibitions in the recent past, the art market possibly thinks he is an artist who is worth its while. Galerie 88’s exhibition, Gobardhan Ash: An Early Modern (it ends today), like his earlier exhibitions elsewhere, neglected to display the paintings for which he is still remembered — his documentation of the famine of 1920s, similar to that of his contemporaries such as Somnath Hore, Zainul Abedin, Ramkinkar Baij, Subho Tagore and Bhabesh Sanyal.
Ash was a prolific artist and he had tried his hand at various subjects, from grim to light-hearted. However, all of them had one thing in common — his powerful draughtsmanship. Be it watercolour, pen and ink, or pencil, his drawing is outstanding in every medium, although a rebellious Ash had never finished his training as
an artist either in Calcutta or in Madras. He used colours sparingly, emphasising the strength and plasticity of his lines.
But unlike an earlier exhibition, the current one does not pretend to be a retrospective. Here the focus is different — Ash’s claim to modernity. That is quite apparent from his treatment of the human form. Instead of sticking to academic realism, Ash did not hesitate to distort human figures to enhance their expressive power. Occasionally, Ash contorted his figures to such an extent that they turned into caricatures, quite similar to Rabindranath Tagore’s own drawings that illustrated his prose composition, “Se”, for his granddaughter, Pupe didi, and the book, Khapchada. Ash, too, has similar drawings that emphasise the absurd. He often strayed into the realm of fantasy, as in his doll-like figures, although not many such works are displayed here. Ash went even further, warping his figures to suggest pain and collective sorrow. In the case of certain feminine portraits, he reduced them to a few fluid strokes of his brush.
The emphasis here is on the farming community and labourers — people who earn their living by the sweat of their brow. Ash belonged to a community of betel farmers. When it came to figuration, he eschewed details, the emphasis being on the strength of the physique and musculature of the lean, work-worn frames. He took no interest in depicting them as individuals, for their strength lay in numbers. The individual is subsumed by the community, quite in keeping with Leftist ideals.
A family of farmers — led by a man leaning on a stick, followed by his wife who bears a child — turns into boldly applied blotches of muddy brown pigment. The same with two women labourers, their saris hitched above their knees, bearing baskets on their head or supported against their waist. They have the heroism of Baij’s sculpture of similar themes.
Ash depicted conventional themes, such as mother and child, dancers and couples, faithfully enough, but economised on colour and detail. It is the rhythm of their bodies in motion that mattered. At times, he used bright colours or turned the figures into silhouettes. Occasionally, there is too much of the same thing. It made one thing clear — Gobardhan Ash constantly experimented with form and line without any thought of sale. And now he has turned into merchandise.