Within a week of the passing of Bipin Goswami, Salt Lake has lost another of its celebrated artistes — Rabin Mondol.

The 90-year-old resident of IB Block passed away on July 2 at 11.40pm at a private hospital. He was a widower and was childless.

According to sources, he had fever which developed into breathing trouble and convulsions. He was hospitalised on June 24 at night and later succumbed to multi-organ failure.

The jolly man’s death has cast a pall of gloom on his neighbours. “I was on my way back after morning walk on June 24. Rabinda was standing in the first floor verandah. I gestured at the ground floor apartment to find out how the occupant Bipinda was doing. ‘Doctor Robbar obdhi time diyechhey, kintu ekhono achhey,’ he had replied. He himself was hospitalised later that day and never got the news of Bipinda’s demise as he was on the ventilator himself,” said artist Tapan Ghosh, who lives in the building adjacent to Mondal’s at Shilpi Abas Co-operative Housing Society.

“He grew up in Howrah where his family was in iron business. The narrow lane where they lived was named after his grandfather Fakirdas Mondal. He developed a foot disorder as a 12-year-old which confined him at home. His father bought him paintbrush and colours to keep him occupied. He would ask his siblings to sit for him as he sketched them,” said Arun Chakraborty of Rekha Chitram, who has made a 25-minute documentary film on his life.

Mondal graduated not in art but in commerce and it was much later, when he was an employee with the railways, that he took up a one-year night course at the Indian College of Art and Draughtsmanship. “He took up the job as he needed to support his family but he never took promotion as he was worried that increased responsibilities would be a hurdle in his artistic career. He rented a place near his overcrowded ancestral house where he set up his studio and stayed. His group of friends, including Soumitra Chatterjee, Ashok Palit and Nirmalya Acharya, brought out the magazine Ekkhon,” said Ghosh, who first met him in 1960. “His office in the Railway Claims Tribunal building was our meeting place,” he added.

Mondal’s first exhibition was in 1962 at the Academy of Fine Arts and he became a member of the Group of Eight which also included other artistes like Prakash Karmakar, Nikhil Biswas and Gopal Sanyal. “In 1963, they did a successful show in Delhi on which a newspaper carried a report, referring to them as ‘Calcutta Painters’ in its headline. That is where they took the name from for their new group which they formed on their return,” said Ghosh.

Mondal and Karmakar were known to scout for artistic talent. Both Ghosh and Shuvaprasanna were spotted by them at exhibitions and asked to join their group. “Rabinda was a great organiser. I travelled to so many places, holding exhibitions with him. He even did art direction in some films,” said Shuvaprasanna.

“He was such an amiable man. Though professional rivalry often hampered relations between artistes of separate groups, Rabinda remained friendly with everyone,” he said.

Rabin Mondal’s last painting that he left unfinished. (Sudeshna Banerjee)

Shuvaprasanna also played a hand in arranging his marriage. “Bani Mitra was 18-20 years junior to Rabinda and a couple of years senior to us. They met at my College Row house and fell in love. She too was an artist.”

Mondal settled in Salt Lake when a bunch of artistes formed a co-operative society and was granted a 14-cottah plot by the then finance minister Ashok Mitra. “We formed a cooperative, depositing Rs 82,000 each. It was a big sum for many of us then,” recalled Shuvaprasanna, now a BH Block resident.

“Rabinda settled in this apartment in August 1996, soon after I did. His wife was suffering from cancer,” Ghosh said. She expired about 15 years ago.

For the last 12 years, his driver Chandan was looking after Mondal and vice versa. “He loved me like a son. When he saw me fiddling with the tubes of colour thrown away by him he taught me how to paint. He used to say that painting did not require formal training but persistence. He even organised three solo exhibitions for me,” said the young man from Balasore in Odisha.

Portrait of an artist

Mondal, in many ways, was a self-taught painter. “He used to work regularly and had evolved a language of his own which seemed to be influenced by tribal art. The figures in his king and queen series seemed to be tribal too. He also used to do animal drawings. An exhibition of those drawings were held at Alliance Francaise du Calcutta,” said Shuvaprasana. Many of his paintings were bought and displayed by the National Gallery of Modern Art in Delhi which brought him fame.

“When Gandhiji came to Howrah Maidan, he sat at the base of the stage and painted him. He changed direction many times in his artistic career. At one time, he was influenced by Vincent Van Gogh,” said his friend, actor Soumitra Chatterjee.

Chakraborty recalls Mondal speaking about the hungry faces that came to their doorstep seeking starch during the famine. “All that deeply affected him,” he said, pointing to tortured faces on Mondal’s canvases.

Ghosh spoke of the importance of expressions in Mondal’s figures. “He moulded himself through industry and initiative,” he said.

At a programme held at Birla Academy in 2018 to mark the start of his 90th year, Mondal had spoken about how he still had to draw at least a line to get by a day. “Eta ekta brata,” he had told The Telegraph Salt Lake as he was walking towards the stage. Indeed, a visit to his apartment revealed recently illustrated canvases stacked on the floor. “This is what he was working on the day he was hospitalised,” said Chandan, pointing to one placed on the easel.

“He was the senior-most artist of our times. This is the end of an era,” summed up Shuvaprasanna.