In 1962, Kartick Chandra Pyne, a thirty-one-year-old man, painted the Moon Bath, which was selected as one of the hundred exhibits representing Modern Indian Art in the historic exhibition at Fukuoka Art Museum, Japan, in 1979. Although recognition came to him early on and he had a long, immensely productive and innovative artistic career, his work had remained forgotten outside a small circle of artists, art connoisseurs and gallerists, mostly from Bengal, until 2005, when one of his paintings Bird in a Cage fetched a record price in a Sotheby’s auction in New York. The success, though he had it long coming, made him famous overnight. In the following years, there was a renewed interest in his work and major exhibitions of his paintings, including a retrospective, took place in Kolkata, Mumbai and New Delhi.
Kartick Pyne was born to an aristocratic gold merchant family on 15 November 1931 in Kolkata. Deeply religious, the family had a rich cultural atmosphere at home and an interest in art. One of his brothers, Fulchand Pyne is a noted sculptor and Ganesh Pyne also had a familial bond with him. Those who personally knew Kartick Pyne saw him as a prolific but introvert artist, who showed certain reluctance to the glamour world of contemporary art and art market and spent his time mostly with close friends and a small group of students, who he privately taught. Kartick Pyne studied painting at the Government College of Art & Craft, Kolkata and excelled in academic realism, which is evident in his early work, particularly the portraits and figure studies. In the post-Independence era, at the time when he enrolled at the art college in the early 1950s, an aspiration was strongly felt among the young Indian artists of the new nation-state to carve a prominent place for themselves in the international art scene. Unlike many of the modern artists before them, they did not hesitate or feel guilty of embracing the Modern Western Art, they rather made use of it freely and unreservedly to create their own visual languages, eclectic, hybrid and capable of capturing the dilemmas of the unquiet times which they were living through.
Of the Bengali artists of his generation, Kartick Pyne was amongst the few who were prompt to recognize the spirit of the age and the new direction modern Indian art was taking. He quickly adapted to the changed notion of art and moved away from academic realism to explore the experimental, avant-garde aesthetics in his work. In his early mature paintings, such as Musicians, Poster Boys and also Moon Bath and Bird in a Cage, done in the 1960s and 70s, he heavily drew upon the styles and idioms of the principal modern artists of the West, such as Matisse and Seurat and dominant trends of modern Western art movements like Post-Impressionism, Cubism, primitivism and Surrealism. Matisse, and, to some extent, Gauguin, remained two major sources of inspiration throughout his artistic career. There is a subtle blending of Matisse’s orderly eroticism with Gauguin’s wild beauty in many of his erotic paintings, particularly those he did in the last two decades of his active life, being largely confined to home due to the paralytic attack that he had in 1994. However, what is significant is certainly not how much his work was derivative; but rather how, in the specific stylistic, conceptual and emotional matrix of his painting, those influences – local, national and foreign – were received and assimilated, making his work exemplary of Indian Modernism.