Picture this: Years ago, after an evening of classical Indian music at the house of the French cultural attaché Vincent Grimaud, Anjolie Ela Menon picked up her brush. The house had a mock ’30s décor, complete with fake marble pillars and tongue-in-cheek collection of bizarre objects from lizards to the Kamadhenu. She used all those elements to create a historic rendition of Frenchman’s House. She also added a crow that sits on the chair.
“I like this painting enough to keep it because it contains so many of the elements I aspire to record, a sense of sombre mysteriousness that mocks itself within the same canvas and references to the past contained in an essentially contemporary format,” said Anjolie 10 years ago. Frenchman’s House is among the three best works on display at the show, “Through the Patina”, that opened at the India Habitat Centre in New Delhi on July 16.
On Friday, Anjolie Ela Menon turned a zesty 70. The Visual Arts Gallery was packed beyond capacity and this critic had to go back on Saturday to look at the show that changed the complexion of the gallery. Hanging a work is purely an Anjoliesque culture. She knows how to create an island within an island. Before you is a host of works that belong to perhaps 50 years of prodigious pouring. And only a gallery like Vadehra, with their high degree of professionalism, could have swung it and hung it the way reflective of a museum’s mood. Look for works signed AED.
Or just begin with a small set of faces, her family — distilled in their dictums of Raphealite rendition. One recalls Anjolie’s words: “When I paint, I take care of sound, movement, dialogue within the creation. You could invent what you wanted. We were a small, bonded community. We could grow within our respective spaces. We had one Dhoomimal Gallery. Now, it is quite scattered. We seem to be almost swallowed by it all. There is tremendous commodification in art.”
Of course, one cannot help but remember Anjolie’s last show at Vadehra Art Gallery as far back as in 2003. Images were like an overlapped computer memory in which there was the animation of the past, energising the truths and beliefs of yesterday and today.
Perhaps that is why in the series that she so positions and poignantly perceives, there is a tendency to play with the form and also invest her objects with an enormous spiritual significance. This was what was written in Age in 2003. And reminiscing over the fact is the truth that this show resonates those very thoughts.
But Anjolie did not only paint. She was known for dynamic digressions. She made six major digressions in the last decade, including Retrieving Junk, an installation art with a difference, Mutations, the computer-aided morphing of her own paintings, glass sculptures (Murano) with Sharan Apparao and then in the early 2000 an enigmatic engagement with kitsch.
If one has to recall Anjolie’s 60th birthday at Neemrana Fort, as the rains fell that afternoon, she answered a question put to her by the late critic Santo Datta: “I have but a decade or so left to work, and now I want to paint just for myself. Now more than ever I want to opt out of both the media and the market. When you get to this point you suddenly feel that years zoom into days.” She added: “And the last decade flew past in such a frenzy that when I look back, I feel there is so much that I need not have done and so much that I did not find time to do. My priorities have to be worked out.”
The Orthodox monk Pyotr 1 (1972) which hangs in her bedroom and Dariba are the finest works in the show. Pyotr has this matte finish brilliance, the manner in which he holds the crucifix to his chest and his hollow eyes speak so much about the church in Russia. Dariba looks more like Anjolie herself; it is the way she positions the little goat in the window that makes for a witty counterpoint. Windows, faces and goats that roamed in her basti in Nizamuddin become the show’s triumph. Among India’s women artists, she is the proverbial thinker. Throughout her career as a painter, Anjolie Ela Menon has regularly re-envisioned her role as an artist and keeps questioning herself. She often states that “dissatisfaction is the source of growth,” encouraging an artist to “abandon known (and often acclaimed) ground for new territory”. Menon sold her first work to Zakir Husain at the tender age of 15 for Rs 750. And one cannot forget how she said she sold 13-14 paintings in 1978 and paid the school fees of her two sons. Interestingly, this show has quaint small works that are priced at an inviting Rs 3-6 lakhs.
This is a time to recall that Anjolie is an accomplished collector too. At her home is a magnificent Ram Kumar, a large work that is impossible to lay hands upon in these days. Over 11 years, she has steadily acquired works by other Indian artists through purchases or friendly swaps. Today, her collection includes such names venerated by lovers of Indian art as M.F. Husain, F.N. Souza, Jamini Roy, Arpita Singh, Manjit Bawa and K.S. Radhakrishnan as well as a host of younger painters and sculptors. At the Visual Arts Gallery, the show is a veritable “Through the Looking Glass”.
If you want to go back in time, do it this week.