7/25/2019 Bhupen Khakhar Isn’t India’s Beryl Cook. He’s Bhupen Khakhar

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Bhupen Khakhar isn’tIndia’s Beryl Cook. He’sBhupen Khakhar.

The Guardian’s review of the artist’s retrospective at theTate reeks of smugness and ignorance.

Posted by Deepanjana Pal | Jun 1, 2016 in Criticles | 1 Comment

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7/25/2019 Bhupen Khakhar Isn’t India’s Beryl Cook. He’s Bhupen Khakhar

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NL SPECIAL

“You Can’t Please All”, Bhupen Khakhar, 1981

It’s taken 140 years, but we’ve 缠nally done it. We’ve got a

picture of the snark. On April Fools’ Day, in 1876, Lewis Carroll

published The Hunting of the Snark , an epic poem about a

mysterious creature that nine men (and a beaver) set out to

chase down. The original publication had illustrations by one

Henry Holiday. Unfazed by Carroll’s descriptions, which explain

that “the Snark was a Boojum, you see” and that it had “a

랤avour of Will-o’-the-wisp”, Holiday somehow managed to

come up with a drawing of the Snark. However, it was not

printed. Carroll told Holiday that he wanted the Snark to be

unimaginable.

Is it possible to have FreedSpeech without also havinfreedom to offend?

No. There are no jokes that

Yes. Only jokes that offend

good jokes.

Freedom of speech and exp

concept most Indians will n

7/25/2019 Bhupen Khakhar Isn’t India’s Beryl Cook. He’s Bhupen Khakhar

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BY NL TEAM

BY RAJYASREE SEN

BY OVERRATED OUTCAS

BY ANAND RANGANATHAN

TRENDING

Excerpt from Gujarat Files:

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on her new book Gujarat

A little more than a century later, snark is all over the map. And

so it is that the veil of mystery that Carroll had so assiduously

kept in place, has now been removed. It pops up so often that

the secret is out: the snark is the critic-journalist in the 21st

century. Or its alter ego. Dr Bruce Banner has Hulk, the online

 journalist has Snark.

Humans love naming things — it helps us with our illusion that

we’ve 缠gured it all out — and sooner rather than later, the

Tenties of the 21st century will be known as the Age of 

Irreverence, the time when it became cooler to desecrate than

to idolise. There’s a lot to be said for this attitude, provided it

doesn’t come accessorised with arrogance and ignorance like

this dismissal of Indian artist Bhupen Khakhar by one of The

Guardian’s art critics, Jonathan Jones.

 Jones has been with The Guardian since 1999 and was on theTurner Prize in 2009. He’s known for being opinionated,

knowledgeable about Western art and savage in his criticism.

As the above article makes evident, we can add “ignorant

about Indian art and culture” and “obnoxious” to this list of 

attributes. Giving the Tate Modern’s exhibition of Khakhar’s

paintings a one-star rating, Jones is less critic and more

rampaging snark in this artle. Here are a few choice excerpts:

“On the evidence of its latest Bankside exhibition, to be a truly 

modern painter has (sic) to be a ham缠sted hack. Talented artists

need not apply.” 

“Why are we supposed to be interested in this old-fashioned,

second-rate artist whose paintings are stuck in a timewarp of 

1980s (sic) neo-缠gurative chic?” 

“Whatever the thinking behind it, this show is a waste of space.” 

 Jones’s article has everything the internet demands of writing

and journalism today. It’s short, aggressively opinionated,

written in a rush and attacking an institution. If only it had

another attribute that the internet o냘ers to those who seek to

be enriched by it: perspective.

It’s not as though Jones is under any compulsion to love

Khakhar’s paintings, but to approach it from as narrow-minded

and ill-informed a point of view as what’s on display in his

review is a disservice to the exhibition, the readers and Jones’s

7/25/2019 Bhupen Khakhar Isn’t India’s Beryl Cook. He’s Bhupen Khakhar

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BY NL TEAM

Filesown reputation. Jones isn’t reviewing Khakhar’s retrospective

as an art critic. He’s viewing it with a Westerner’s gaze — with

all the smugness and pomposity that he can command. As a

result, all his reference points are from Western art history and

from the words that Jones has chosen, there’s evident rage at

Khakhar’s naked fakirs taking up space that Jones believes

should be occupied by British (and white) artists.

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This is the bias and the conviction that Western culture is the

yardstick against which Others must be measured, that

postcolonial scholars have been beating their heads against

for decades. You’d think it would be unnecessary to point this

out in the 21st century, when the internet is turning the world

into a global village, but if Jones’s article is any indication, the

road is long for postcolonial theorists.

“That must be why Howard Hodgkin, David Hockney and Frank

Auerbach have to make do with retrospectives at Tate Britain,

while the incredibly unimpressive Indian painter Bhupen

Khakhar, who died in 2003, is glori缠ed as an important modern

artist in the hallowed…Tate Modern,” writes Jones at one point

in his review. Later, he likens Khakhar to RB Kitaj, Joe Tilsonand Tom Philips — all British artists. The only detail that Jones

is able to appreciate is a “funny caricature of an Englishman in

a pub”. Imagine that: in an exhibition full of scenes from Indian

lives, the one 缠gure that struck Jones was that of an

Englishman. That’s how narrow-minded Jones is while viewing

Khakhar’s retrospective.

 Jones’s idea of broadening his perspective is to look to

Scotland (“Khakhar’s paintings made me think particularly of 

the Scottish artist Stephen Campbell, whose narrative pictures

are similarly big and boring.”) and America (“…the Robert

Mapplethorpe of Mumbai he ain’t. More like the Beryl Cook.”).

Because heaven forbid Jones see Khakhar as a distinctive artist

who has nothing to do with Western art and therefore doesn’t

need to be squished to 缠t the moulds created by the likes of 

Campbell, Mapplethorpe and Cook. Why bother to look at

Indian art history and the society that Khakhar was responding

7/25/2019 Bhupen Khakhar Isn’t India’s Beryl Cook. He’s Bhupen Khakhar

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to and the conventions he rejected, with everything from his

stature as a self-taught artist to his homosexual identity and

his cheekiness? Best to dismiss all this. To keep any of it in

mind, Jones would have to look a little beyond the West that is

at the centre of the art world as Jones sees it. Only, according

to Jones, that would display “some misplaced notion that non-

European art needs to be looked at with special critical

generosity”. So Jones casually casts Khakhar, a towering 缠gure

in the history of modern Indian art, as a two-bit artist, hovering

on the periphery, inching towards the centre through the

gateway that is Tate Modern in London. Rule, Britannia!

There’s a certain illiteracy that some Western critics and

publications show towards India and the non-West that’s

astounding. Take this review of the same show, for example.

It’s full of praise, but if you scroll down, you’ll see that there’s a

reference to “Ghandi”. Much like The Guardian, which let Jones’s article be published despite missing words and dodgy

syntax, The Telegraph too couldn’t be bothered to do a basic

copy edit of the review.

If Jones had published the article that’s masquerading as a

review on The Guardian as a personal blog post, it wouldn’t be

worth much more than a couple of tsks. To his claim that

Khakhar is a “second-rate artist”, one could easily lob the

counter-claim that Jones has no taste. Or that he should make

an appointment with a neurologist because anyone who

describes Khakhar’s paintings as “staid” either doesn’t know

the meaning of the word or is brain-damaged. (One would

assume Jones knows the meaning of the word; hence the

neurologist.)

But Jones’s article is not a personal blog post. It’s an article by a

writer who is on the sta냘 of a reputed newspaper. From him,

one expects critical perspective and insight, rather than just

snark.

Khakhar’s paintings are not pretty, as Jones as observed.

They’re awkward, dazzling, con랤icted and crowded with

colours, stories and ideas. They don’t conform to conventions,

artistic or social. They’re teeming with details that have been

lovingly and meticulously painted. Tableaux that seem

haphazard are actually carefully choreographed. Colours that

seem to bleed spontaneously highlight very particular aspects

7/25/2019 Bhupen Khakhar Isn’t India’s Beryl Cook. He’s Bhupen Khakhar

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of the scene being depicted. The curve of the arm, the

direction of a gaze, the intensity of a shade — everything adds

a layer to the story being told. A story that’s as real as it is

imaginary, because Khakhar, with his amazing empathy and

ability to make friends, was a collector of stories.

Khakhar’s paintings are revelations about us as a society, the

role of the artist, and the emotional tangle that tautens whenan artist chooses his own life as his subject. His paintings show

an India that doesn’t exist any more — the India before

globalisation — and Khakhar recorded its details with an

accountant’s eye before representing with the colourful

irreverence of his artist self. Often, Khakhar’s India is exotic,

but it’s exotica that glints with self-awareness and rarely has

any hint of prettiness. Yet, it’s beautiful, for all its chaos,

ugliness and weird alignments.

Perhaps because he had to grapple with having multiple

identities as a gay man in the 1980s, Khakhar was keenly

aware of the hybrid that is India. That’s what makes his

paintings special, whether or not one ‘likes’ them. And here’s

the real shame. Jones, with his stubborn refusal to allow the

centre to perhaps shift a few steps east of Britannia, can only

see an artist who doesn’t belong in the British artist canon.

Khakhar isn’t either the Beryl Cook of Bombay or the

Mapplethorpe of Mumbai or a parallel to any other artist. He’s

Bhupen Khakhar and that Jones can’t unblinker himself to

appreciate that is a shame.

The author can be contacted on Twitter @dpanjana

 All our articles are run through a software to avoid the possibility of unattributed work 缠nding its way into

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