The Hindu Business Line : Classic colours

Bengal, over the centuries, has nurtured many great art traditions and some artists like Abananindranath or Nandalal Bose (of Bengal School fame) have blazed new trails for generations of painters to follow. One such relatively unsung talent was the late Chandra Nath Dey, whose much-awaited second retrospective of 110 classical paintings will open tomorrow at Kolkata's Academy of Fine Arts.

Product of the city's Government College of Art, Dey in fact worked as a cartographer at the offices of the Port Commissioners, Calcutta (now Kolkata Port Trust) for over 25 years, and quietly pursued his first love diligently in the serene environs of his ancestral home at Keshub Sen Street in North Calcutta. An ace photographer with a special love for Indian classics, Dey's real masterpieces, say some of his admirers, were the series on the Ramayana and Mahabharata.

He was also an art consultant for some of the highly acclaimed calendars produced by Grant Advertising (India) Ltd in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Layout artists of that time at Grant, like Chuni Banerjee, recall the humane qualities of Dey, who was self-effacing by nature. Dey also captured on camera some of the great temple architectures of South India, which in turn fired his imagination for his classical paintings.

He specialised in western colours and wash painting. While he did not subscribe to any particular school of painting, his focus was on oriental arts. His versatility was amply evident in his works — a classic example is the painting of a rajanigandha flower in tempera, which will be part of the retrospective.

Among Dey's classical collections is `Elope' depicting Prithviraj Chauhan eloping with Princess Sanjukta on horseback, and `Mood of Spring', painted in 1969. A year before this, he had received a gold medal from Rabindra Bharati University in recognition of his work in wash painting.

Dey first encountered oriental arts when he participated in a group exhibition for young Asian artists, organised in Japan in 1957 by the Japan Cultural Forum, Tokyo. This was followed by a series of exhibitions, both group and solo (between 1966 and 1998), organised by institutions like Rabindra Bharati University and Rashtriya Lalit Kala Academy, culminating in the first retrospective at Birla Academy of Arts & Culture, Kolkata, in 1998.

When this writer met Dey some years ago (he passed away in 2004), and asked him what inspired his work, the artist quoted Sir Joshua Reynolds: "The object of art is to crystallise emotion into thought, and then fix it in form."

Says his son, Partha Dey, who specialises in ceramic pottery, "My father firmly believed that the highest triumph of art is the truest presentation of art." Partha says his father displayed such complete mastery over the materials he handled that it was not difficult for him to tackle even new subjects like Batik paintings on cloth.

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