Female Artists in the Land of Male Artists: The Curious Case of Kishori Kaul

 

While standing in front of the paintings of Kishori Kaul, a question flashes in my mind. Is her visual language male or female? Language is neutral and devoid of gender, they say. But we know that language is an ideologically driven tool, and it has gender. Visual language too has gender and ideology. The more an artist becomes aware about her leaning towards ideology and gender politics the more she uses gendered and ideologically driven language. What would have happened to those women artists who were destined to live among the dominant male artists and carve out a niche for themselves? Either they would leave the place altogether (exactly the way Amrita Sher Gil left Europe saying that she was leaving Europe to Picasso and taking India for herself) or stick to the same place and compete with the male artists (like Leonor Fini and Dorothea Tanning during the surrealist period and Lee Krasner of the Abstract Expressionist time) and gain marginal success and fame.

 

Kishori Kaul belongs to the latter group who decided to stick to the same place where the male artists dominated. She was born in Kashmir and went to study art in the illustrious Faculty of Fine Arts, Baroda. Both the artist and the institution were taking baby steps, and the enthusiasm was very high. It was post-Sher Gil time and B.Prabha and Nasreen Mohammedi were her contemporaries, with slight difference in years. Sher Gil was a huge possibility and a hindrance for most of the women artists. Sher Gil had the socio-cultural means to be a liberal and liberated woman artist much ahead of her times. She could negotiate with the royal houses and could find patrons among the rich and powerful. The case of the post-Sher Gil women artists was not like that. They were absolutely home grown and had to wage war against the existing social conditions that prevented women from becoming independent human beings with creative abilities.

 

N.S.Bendre was one of the teachers who established the fundamentals of teaching modern art in Baroda’s faculty of fine arts. He was a maverick and worked like a magician using different palettes, brushes, knives and other tools. He was more inclined to make rural subjects with lean and dark figures, obviously a departure from the so called Indian School of painting, which again is a derivate of the Calcutta School of painting perfected by Abanindranath Tagore, Asit Kumar Haldar, Nandalal Bose and so on. While the earlier doyens stuck to their premises with limited palettes, romantic effects and lofty philosophies to substantiate their creations, N.S.Bendre created a different kind of aesthetics across the Indian mainland without any restrictions. But Bendre, despite his urban experiences reminded rural at heart and his creativity overflowed when he worked on the rural imagery.

 

Ideologically, Bendre did not lean too much towards any nationalistic project the way his elders had done. Perhaps, Bose had some influence regarding the choice of the subjects. Inspired Ajanta paintings, off and on Bose went into the mythological stories of both Buddhism and Hinduism. It was a part of the larger cultural makeup of the country, which the modernists somehow preferred to keep aside, allowing only occasional entries into their works. Bendre, however kept mythologies out of his works and focused on secular subjects, something that defined the Baroda School of painters including the imported K.G.Subramanyan. B.Prabha, coming from the Bendre school of painting, turned her attention towards the rural folk and fish mongers and one could say that her works had this distinct quality in terms of subject matter. However, when it came to the style, she could not move much away from the Bendre school of painting.

 

Kishori Kaul too, in the big bad world of male painters, seems to have been stuck with the male visual language. Kaul’s works from the 60s are best example of this. She uses thick impastos of oil paint using palette knife for its application. The works have that modernist vintage flair that attracts one towards her paintings. As you keep watching her works, the question that came to my mind in the beginning refuses to budge. Keeping the biographical details of Kaul apart from her works, how does one discern that the works are painted by a female painter. The works currently on display at the Triveni Gallery in Delhi, presented by Anant Art Gallery, impart this feeling that Kaul is one kind of a woman artist who has not differentiated her language from that of the male artists of her formative years and later on. There is intrinsic evidence that tell the viewer of her indebtedness to the late 19^th and mid 20^th century male painters of the West routed through the Indian modernists.

 

As she progressed in age, she seems to have loosened up her otherwise tight palette with thick knife applications and let the canvas peep out through the brush strokes. She has finally picked up brush and left the knife behind. The change in the tool has made all the difference. The background becomes lucid, and the contours are visible in their curvaceous lines. They almost look like Japanese portrait paintings with blank background created by pigment swatches. Further we move to see her works that are inspired nature; there are landscapes, close up of lotus ponds, lily ponds and so on. The spring in her mind comes back in random strokes on the canvas through liberated color applications.

 

The organizers have called it a retrospective. There is only scant literature about the artist in the internet space. Each piece available says the same thing; her early days in Kashmir, a great grandfather who was an artist, an affliction of tuberculosis during her teens, her first tryst with colors and canvas, her art education in Baroda and so on. There are mentions about the influence of the spring, snow, hills, valleys, flowers and water from her native in her works. But the works say a different story, at least in the exhibits. When Kaul paints, she paints like a male artist. There is nothing that leads to make her distinct from the male artists of the time. I don’t blame her. It was the dilemma that most of the women artists of the time had gone through. Salvaging Kishori Kaul from those dominant male visual narratives and finding a space for herself in the hall of fame is important. Hope that will happen soon, before she is made into a spectacle in the auction sales (or the effort to make her a spectacle in the auction sales) because auction houses also need some convincing narrative to make a sales pitch.

 

-JohnyML