Ganesh Pyne was born in 1937 in Calcutta. Pyne grew up listening to his grandmother’s folktales and reading fantasy stories from children’s books. His young mind was also deeply affected by Calcutta riots that preceded the partition of India. These shaped and developed his own style of “poetic surrealism”, fantasy and dark imagery, around the themes of Bengali folklore and mythology.
Ganesh Pyne does not remember when he started painting, but remembers the anger of his parents when he decided to become an artist. Finally, his uncle Manohar Pyne arranged for his admission to the Government College of Art and Craft, Kolkata. Though Pyne rejected academic studies, he showed a remarkable predilection for words and ideas. He was a voracious reader and attended different poetry-reading sessions. He is one of the very few artists in Bengal who could bridge the hiatus between the world of words and the world of images. His first painting was ‘Winter’s Morning’, which showed him and his brother going to school.
After graduating from the Government College of Art and Craft in 1959, he joined the first animation studio of India-Mandar Studios. Under the guidance of the film director, Mandar Mullick, he became a meticulous draughtsman and adopted the skills to distort and exaggerate features to convey different emotions. He used this stylistic technique throughout his career to create a sense of uncanny and eerie in his paintings.
As a teenager, Pyne was inspired by nationalist art of Sunayani Devi 1875-1962 and Abanindranath Tagore 1871-1951. He was influenced by their romantic, symbolist style based on Indian mythology using ink wash and tempera but he quickly moved on. His paintings are metaphysical and suffused with a primeval darkness.
The lines are bold, precise, controlled and the drawings that emerge are potent in both form and content. Stripped of colour, they convey the architectonic quality in the structuring of the images. He applied multiple layers of translucent colour onto the canvas and then burnishing it, creating areas of penetrating light and shadow. It gives the appearance as if the paintings are glowing from within.
Ganesh Pyne was an introvert and a shy person. He kept away from limelight and art collectors alike and never held any major exhibition. The journalist and film maker, Pritish Nandy described him as a man who ‘radiated a mysterious quality’. He was an intensely private artist who rarely gave interviews, which meant clues to his personality were often sought for in his paintings charged with the supernatural.
For many years he lived the life of an ascetic in his north Calcutta home, and it was not until the late 1970s, when the celebrated artist M.F. Hussain named him the best painter in India, that he gained nationwide recognition for his dark surrealism. It took time for the artist’s works to gain international recognition. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, his work fetched one of the highest prices among the Indian artists. Ganesh Pyne is the recipient of the Gagan Abani Puraskar, Visva Bharati, 1997; the Abainindra Puraskar, Government of West Bengal 2004; Lifetime Achievement Award, Star Ananda, Kolkata, 2008; Raja Ravi Varma Award, Government of Kerala 2011; and Lifetime Achievement Award, Indian Chamber of Commerce 2012. Ganesh Pyne passed away in 2013.
The exhibition, organized by Mr Prabhas Kejariwal of Chitrakoot Art Gallery and Mr Ashatit Halder of Charulata, will be held at Chitrakoot Art Gallery from 10 April to 10 May 2026, 1pm to 7pm.
