The recently held exhibition of the almost forgotten modern Indian master Abani Sen (1907-72) at Rabindra Bhavan, New Delhi , was a timely reminder that art, like music, was more about feeling than mere intellection. Sen came from an India that was literally more than one-third green despite the teeming population. Thick forests still existed in many parts of the undivided sub-continent and the rivers were full-bodied and unpolluted. In the minds and eyes of artists of his generation, nature was both king and queen.

Abani Sen was brought up like many of his colleagues in the English watercolour tradition having been a student at a British run art institution, The Government College of Art and Craft, Cacultta. He had indeed come to be noticed by the British principal Percy Brown. He learned the secrets of the tricky medium and became one of the most expressive of the watercolourists East or West, the American master John Marin included.

Few people have painted deer so expressively. He gave them gravity, dignity and yes, soul. A sense of being. He retained these qualities even when he painted them as almost abstractions. How he managed to achieve this is anyone's guess. There are not many people in the history of art, both oriental and occidental, who have painted deer or any other animal with so much feeling. He was to be sure an artist of distilled emotion.

There was a vertical watercolour composition of deer amidst the green of the forest which was deeply poetic and a perfect example of the merger of form and content-quite literally so. Seen from a short distance it looked like an elegant abstract, upclose one immediately noticed the deer amongst the foliage and how nature had served as protective camouflage. The vibrations set by the greenery and the skin of the deer themselves, were harmonious. The tone of the picture may be considered to be romantic but certainly not sentimental.

It is amazing to note how free his work was of sentimentality. In the 1930s, 40s and 50s how much this one emotion dominated Indian art, especially from Bengal is difficult to imagine now. Sen was an anomaly. His work had great feeling and energy but there was hardly any scope for sighs and snivels. A work, which was not in the show, entitled ‘Van Gogh's Boots' is a case of pint. Sen pays tribute to the late 19 th century Dutch master and one of the fathers of modern art in the West, by cloning his version of an already famous masterpiece, and also manages to leave the stamp of his own personality, which was at the same time rugged, stubborn and tender.

All his life, he died in the late middle-age, he painted and drew in the manner which suited him. He did not try to be ‘modern' as many well-known contemporaries of his were trying to be, but remained himself – curious and forward looking. He knew deep down inside who he was and that was his greatest strengths.

There were in the show charcoal and conti portraits of friends, probably that would evoke admiration anywhere, anytime. A 1934 portrait in red conti of an old man also need to be mentioned. It had enough craft to evoke admiration, but more than that it aslo had in the rendering the sitter's journey through life. The achievement was certainly not deliberate but no less valuable for it.

He had, like every artist worth the salt, flirted with cubism but used it in a playful, decorative (to use the word positively) manner. His experiments with cubism, though short-lived, gave much pleasure. An image of a deer flock in motion is memorable.

His ink and brush work too remains in the memory. A large bull retaining all its own physiological characteristics also appears to merge with the elements. The vertical composition on off-white paper is an apt example of realism – not strict naturalism – finding a mean with and in abstraction. Even his worst realistic works embrace the abstract. One very early one in black and white ofa cheetah against a crag of rock is an example.

Like many of his art school-trained contemporaries, Sen too enjoyed the usual subject matter: portraits, still lives, landscape, street scenes, etc. However, the manner in which he rendered them was uniquely his own. His sensibility was a perfect amalgam of a Dhakaiyya – he was born in the riverine culture of the primier city of East Bengal , Dhaka – having absorbed the techniques of western art and its aesthetics and using it to paint pan Indian images.

Abani Sen's creations for all their energy are essentially introspective. Perhaps he is the only artist of his time who appaers to be both observer and participant in his own works. Had he been told this he would habe smiled the suugestion away. There was for instance a landscape with a hut on the left capturing the post-lunch early winter light. The technique is post-impressionist, the colours bright yet controlled. The emotion it evokes is one of serenity. Here again his penchant for attaining abstraction with minimum means comes to the fore. This water colour reminds one of a fine piece of instrumental music and does not need words to explain it. It has, without denigrading the expression, an international feel to it.

A street intersection with a large stean roller sen in a clear morning light is a lovely watercolour that is specific in feel and content and yet also a difficult to pin down in terms of aesthetic inspiration. The control of brush and paint is understated enough to denote mastery. His pictures though a depiction of the ‘real' world of his times, were also in the main abstract, in the sense they went well beyond the subject matter. In this respect he was a worthy colleague of the American master Edward Hopper, who was an anomaly in his times at home when artists like Mark Rothko, Joseph Albers and others were trying to depict a non-representational private world in an effort to flee from the real one. Hopper, on the other hand, by painting the world around him, managed to paint pictures that were as poignant and personal as any by the abstractionists.

Sen's period of apprenticeship coincided with that of Sailoz Mookherjea, a master-to-be and two years his junior. Both Sen and Mookerjea followed the path of abstraction with their feet firmly planted in the real world. Their subject matter was bland and similar, the usual street scene and landscapes with a few faces thrown in for good measure. They, however, differed in one respect. Sailoz was hardly a painter of animals that Abani was. The only time Sailoz did paint them were cows, reproduced in the Illustrated Weekly under A.S. Raman's editorship in the late 1950s.

Abani Sen reveled in the animal world and that of birds. Wittily displayed in the show were a study of baby monkey and its mother in yellow, gamboge and bits of green, and, another one of a woman with her baby; the palette suggesting nocturnal stirrings with shades of blue. Both the oils in terms of treatment were poetic. Though, they would have looked brighter and better with cleaning of dirt and dust by an expert hand as would have other oils on display.

The show contained a small part of this prolific artist's work. The principal objective of the curator Ina Puri one may presume, was sale. The duration of the exhibition was too short – only a week. If the intent was commercial then pricing the catalogue at Rs 1,500.oo makes sense.

It world, however, be a good idea to bring out a fat book of the artist's work containing, say 200 select reproductions and two or three really well thought out essays. After all, Abani Sen held his own against the likes of Binod Behari Mukherjee, Ramkinker Baij, Sailoz Mookerjea, M.F. Husain, F.N. Souza, Gaitonde, Ara and Raza not to forget N.S. bendre and K.G. Subramanian. Some official or unofficial body could take up this project and bring to art lovers the work of self-effacing, gifted artist like Abani Sen for a long and sustained look.

Whispered Legacy
Abani Sen
April 17 - 22, 2008
Lalit Kala Academy , Rabindra Bhavan, New Delhi-110 001