On His 110th Birth Anniversary, A Kaleidoscopic View At The Early Modern Painter Sailoz Mookherjea

Sailoz Mookherjea was 26 years young when the art world took notice of one of his earliest paintings in 1933. Village Puja, as the monograph was titled, bore a Western neoclassical touch, scholars note, but then the Bengal-born painter moved to Delhi a decade later and travelled to Europe to come back to his country with a style that had vastly changed from his budding days.

Today, on his 110th birth anniversary, the national capital is holding a landmark exhibition on Sailoz, widely regarded as one of India’s pioneering modernists who works bore his impressions as a lover of the nature around and its people. Dhoomimal Art Gallery in Connaught Place is hosting the November 1-30 show, coinciding with the 30th death anniversary of Mahendra Jain, its former owner. On display are works from the collection of Ram Babu, who founded Dhoomimal in 1936 when the country had no contemporary-art galleries.

Dhoomimal’s Mohit Jain, who has is Babu’s grandson and curated the ongoing event, regrets that Sailoz (1907-60) is seldom remembered in the 21st century even as the artist’s name figures among the nine modern Indians whose works have been declared as a national treasure. “His paintings attract people from all walks of life, from a layman to connoisseur,” Jain adds.

Back to Village Puja (from the collection of the Maharaja of Patiala), it bears testimony to Sailoz’s mastery in handling oil medium, points out late critic A.S. Raman, a native of a village in Cudappah of Andhra Pradesh. “Therein lies the secret of his lucidity and luminosity,” adds the writer, who had served as a dean in the Faculty of Art at Thanjavur’s Tamil University.

Scholar Partha Chatterjee finds Village Puja painted “with a lot of feeling and perception”. Yet, in 1937 when he returned from Paris where he had met iconic Henri Matisse known for his reputation alongside revolutionary cubist Pablo Picasso, Sailoz had to his credit “at least two memorable paintings”, he says. One was Portrait Of A Dutch Girl that banks on post-impressionist technique which was “enough to transcend mere virtuosity to become a haunting memory image”. The other was A Lane In Italy that is, by contrast, “bland on first viewing, but on a closer inspection can possibly yield several painterly, therefore aesthetic secrets”.

Chatterjee recalls that Sailoz came to Delhi when the city was artistically virgin, having been economically and politically been ravaged by the British. This, when Sailoz had already gained a name in Calcutta that hosted his first solo exhibition in 1937. That was five years after the youth from Burdwan had joined the School of Art in that eastern Indian metropolis, where he went on to work as the art director with Imperial Tobacco Company.

The style that Sailoz evolved—primarily groomed in the Bengal school of art led primarily by Swadeshi exponent Abanindaranath Tagore (1861-1941)—is a natural reflection of the artist’s personality, notes artist-critic Jaya Appasamy (1918-84). Describing his as an active man full of curiosity and a keen sense of observation, she notes the artist had a large circle of friends in whom he found a lot of joy. “He was extremely well-informed, and was a remarkable conversationalist and guest whom it was a delight to entertain,” points out the Madras-born writer. 

Perhaps there was another side to Sailoz, going by Chatterjee’s account. “He was sociable enough, but lonely. He lived in modest, sometimes frugal, lodgings. His eating habits were erratic and alcohol became a constant companion to offset his loneliness.” In Delhi Polytechnic, Sailoz didn’t find his colleagues in the art department “stimulating or sophisticated enough”, Chatterjee adds, also noting that this urbanity was “not acquired on his European sojourn; it was always there” even as he was “hugely popular with the diplomats of various countries stationed in Delhi.”

The artist later worked as a lecturer at the Sarada Ukil School of Art on Janpath, again in the heart of Delhi, where the pay was meagre and “he could not have stayed for long”. Not surprising, thus, that Sailoz was a “painter of moods and essence of fleeting experience”. Nonagenarian Ram Kumar recalls about the fellow artist’s drawing as “excellent”, with the canvas “charged, full of energy”.

Chimes in Sailoz’s student Eric Bowen: “Ironically, it was poverty that chased him throughout his life in Delhi. He was not a darling of the corporate world.” In fact, Bowen, known for setting in 1958 ‘The Unknown’ collective to encourage emerging artists, winds back to point out that Sailoz was “orphaned, probably at birth, or soon after” though he was born in a affluent family. Curator Jain says he does not see a superficial form of Bohemianism in Sailoz’s works, “but an attitude adopted to preserve one’s own exceptional artistic language, marked by their deep connection with India.” Looked in another way, “Sailoz’s life, like his painting, was both spontaneous and romantic, often with more than a tinge of sadness,” says Chatterjee.  

Critic-author Richard L. Bartholomew (1926-85) says Sailoz’s landscapes are not picnickers’ delight. “The few Rajasthan women—faceless, but not formless, and clad in just that rhythm of India that conceals and reveals—sit brooding beside a well, congregating in quiet.” To Bartholomew, this idiom was founded on the artist’s thorough study of folk art in India. “It is apparent that he chartered for himself certain schools of Pahari painting—Kangra and Rajput, particularly,” he says, adding Sailoz owed considerable influence to the later paintings of short-lived Hungarian-Indian Amrita Shergill known for her avant-garde streak.

Journalist-writer Rakshat Puri, who died in 2012 at age 88, says Sailoz’s works have “defied passage of time and change of environment to remain relevant to our condition today.” India Post released a 1978 stamp carrying the artist’s famed work titled The Mosque.

Overall, Sailoz, “like Gopal Ghosh (1913-80), swam against the tide of even in their time” by choosing to “celebrate the beauty of the landscape that was before them or that which they recalled from their childhood and youth,” according to Chatterjee. Yet, Bowen recalls about a younger Sailoz thus: “He bought out an old bundle of photographs and happily showed his pictures with Lady Mountbatten (Edwina, wife of the last viceroy of India) etc. Perhaps that was his only personal possession those days.”