Shanu Lahiri

Shanu Lahiri (23 January 1928 – 1 February 2013) was a painter and art educator who belonged to one of the most prominent and culturally elevated families of Kolkata and a first-generation modernist who emerged post independence.

She was one of Kolkata's most prominent public artists, often dubbed as "the city's First Lady of Public Art", undertaking extensive graffiti art drives across Kolkata to beautify the city and hide aggressive political sloganeering.

Her paintings are housed in the Salar Jung Museum and the National Gallery of Modern Art.

Shanu Lahiri was born on 23 January 1928 in Calcutta (now Kolkata) into one of Calcutta's most prominent artistic families-the Mazumdar family of seven siblings.

Her mother, Renukamoyee Mazumdar, though unlettered, practised calligraphy at night.

Lahiri had two older brothers, the noted litterateur and writer Kamal Kumar Majumdar and artist Nirode Mazumdar, one of the Greats of 20th century modernism, now largely forgotten and a founder member of The Calcutta Group.

Growing up in this atmosphere of intense creativity she was equally influenced by her mother's culinary skills.

She recalls in her memoirs-

"Not far away Niru-da is busy doing a wash of a big painting he has just finished. As for dada, the eldest of our siblings, he is forever scribbling away. That was how it always was throughout my childhood...all of it flowing into my veins, forming my very being. I did not realise then what it was that I was witnessing and absorbing as a matter of course."

As a student of the Government College of Art & Craft, Calcutta, she belonged to one of the earliest batches of female students who entered on the year of the nation's Independence and studied under Atul Bose & Ramendranath Chakraborty during her first two years.

In her third year she studied under professor Basanta Ganguly, a valiant representative of conservative, if not academic traditions in art.

At the art college she was drilled into being a technically adept draftsman, following the curriculum set by the British colonial system, however was at loggerheads with Basanta Ganguly on many occasions as she would recall years later in a candid interview.

Following the formation of the "Calcutta Group" in 1943, a tendency to get organised in groups emerged among artists in different pockets of India.

In 1944 the "Progressive Painters Association" was formed under the guidance of K.C.S. Paniker in Madras, the Progressive Artists' Group came into being in Bombay in 1947, "Delhi Shilpi Chakra" was established in 1949.

So without doubt the "Calcutta Group" was the pioneer of these efforts its forming artists' collectives which paved the way for others to follow.

Her first exhibition of paintings took place in 1950 which was followed by a string of exhibitions.

On her return from Paris, she held a string of painting exhibitions both in India and abroad.

She graduated in 1951 and was the first student of the college to receive the AIFACS President's gold medal for her outstanding contributions in art while being an undergraduate.

In 1955 she daringly took on the challenge to hold a solo exhibition at the AIFACS gallery.

It was here, where she found herself exhibiting her works opposite two senior masters from Bombay, Gaitonde and Gade.

In 1956 she received a French Government Scholarship, which enabled her to study in Paris for a period of two years between 1956 and 1958.

She studied at the École du Louvre where she learnt art history and art-appreciation and at the Académie Julian she learnt painting.

This international exposure enabled her to break free from the strictures of Academic training and the lingering stereotype of 'Indian-style' painting that prevailed amongst most Indian artists.

Shanu Lahiri entered her artistic career in the heady years of India's Independence.

Breaking away from her initial academic training was crucial to making the new modernist art which infused the influence and inspirations of international art movements.

It was fully in keeping with the period's main artistic trends that she moved from her training and in Paris she actively embraced the legacy of the French High Modern.

Embracing the vocabularies of contemporary European modernism as the key idioms of her practice, like many of her generation, Paris was the Mecca of Modernism-the artistic repertoires of Picasso, Matisse, Chagall and Rousseau had remained cognizable reference points for her own innovations with form, colour and content-which left a lasting impact on her.

From this rich, historical repertoire of art emerged her own trademark style which she was known for- a particular mode of contorted human figuration, a flourish of bold lines and brushwork and raw bright colours with a flair for magnitude and scale.

Following her academic career in the West, in the late 1970s, she joined the faculty of the Rabindra Bharati University as a reader in the visual arts department; later she became dean of its faculty of visual arts.

While at the university, she initiated the practice of analyzing and copying Rabindranath Tagore's work as an exercise to delve deeper into his style as in the West one copied Old Masters as part of classroom activity, for which she received strong criticism.

The decade of the 80's was dominated by the increasingly public profile of Shanu Lahiri, as an educationist, organiser and art-activist.

The decade now saw the artist engaged in a public role.

Following the practice of artists creating the image of goddess Durga at Bakulbagan which started in 1975 by Nirode Mazumdar, Shanu Lahiri designed the Durga idol twice for Bakulbagan, following the lead of other artists who each year created modern and stylistic idioms to work within a clay-modelled image of the goddess.

From the 1980s, one arresting feature of her oeuvre was her predilection for vast sizes and scale, as her work began to unfurl, mural-like over stretches of canvas or paper where she moved from densely narrative and illustrative compositions to a growing simplification and economy of forms addressing social issues.

The human figure remained her forte, with figures expanding from her signature portrait heads in quiet repose to an animated array of animals.

In the last two decades, the 1990s and 2000s, her studio had been a place of continued inventiveness and innovations.

Retaining her primary commitment to painting and drawing, she tested new mediums and surfaces, experimenting in different phases with enamel painting on acrylic sheets, painting on wooden and ceramic plates, etchings on X-ray plates and "torch light" drawings on bromide paper.

A parallel rising urge for sculpture had seen her move from small clay models and perfume bottle figures cast in bronze.

Through her art, Shanu Lahiri addressed the contemporary realities of society.

She was recognised for her highly individualistic style and became a leading artist on Kolkata's contemporary art scene, along with fellow painter Karuna Shaha.