It is not easy to swim against the currents, break with tradition, and innovate. But it is perhaps as difficult to stick with the traditional when the countercurrents of change are sweeping away everything around oneself. Atul Bose came into his own as an artist during the peak of the Bengal School’s success, with artists like Abanindranath Tagore revolutionising the artistic idiom not just in Bengal but across the country. Yet, instead of following in the footsteps of these path-breakers, he decided to wage a crusade for the scholastic style of painting, which was being rejected for its colonial moorings.
His loyalty to this academic style was evident in many of the works displayed in Persistence of Time, a recent exhibition at Debovasha. The musculature of the figure drawings done as part of his classwork at the Royal Academy, for instance, is exquisite. Yet, there is a sentimentality in even his most studied sketches, especially when the subjects are Bose’s near and dear ones — the technically faultless sketches of his sleeping wife (picture, top right) and children have a poignance that the practice of figure-sketching ordinarily abjures. Sentiments are often conveyed not through explicit expressions or gestures but in the way Bose perceives shapes. A small doodle — no bigger perhaps than one phalanx of the thumb — shows a boat in Windsor with four smudgy, silhouetted figures. Its minuscule size notwithstanding, the effort of the rower and the more pleasurable, relaxed postures of the others cruising on the boat are evident.
That Bose was not completely immune to the artistic countercurrents of the time can be discerned from his watercolours, especially one rather impressionist rendering of Benares (picture, bottom) where the water and the sky melt into each other and the cityscape is pushed to the margins in a busy blur of shapes. Bose allows the palpable beauty of nature to somewhat dilute his mimetic fidelity in the renderings of trees, be they in his backyard (picture, top left) or in Shimla and Shillong. The colours bleed and blend to create eye-catching, shimmering foliages.
