Professor Ranbir Singh Bisht was born on October 4, 1928 in Lansdowne in the Garhwal region of Uttarakhand. Born in the serene lap of nature, Professor Bisht naturally took to nature, the mountains, their hues and the pristine saturation of the blue sky. However he never abandoned the human resence. You will often find his landscapes with a solitary human figure, thereby juxtaposing the mortal figure with the infiniteness of nature. But to simply brand him as nature or landscape painter or a watercolor artist would be a huge disservice to the vast body of work he has left behind. It was not that Professor Bisht did not focus on the human figure. His ‘Lust Series’ the ‘Unwanted Series’ and Lucknow’s ‘Headless Series’ are a fine example of that. The visitors will find one representative painting of each of these series in this 25th death anniversary commemorative exhibition in New Delhi. Professor Bisht whose intellectual growth was shaped by the Coffee House culture of Lucknow in the 60s, was a well-read, soally and politically aware artist, whose inner anguish was a combined response to social fault lines and artistic turbulence. His restless spirit dwelled in his short and lean body that was stout and strong, and in a way symbolized his unflinching beliefs and positions on many issues and of course art.

No wonder Professor Bisht’s works were a part of many international exhibitions in Frankfurt, Tokyo, Sao-Paulo, Fukuoka and India, besides several solo shows in New York, Bombay, Delhi, Chandigarh, Shimla, Allahabad and his hometown Lansdowne amongst others. He was awarded the National Award in 1965, Fellowship of National Lalit Kala Akademi in 1988, U.P State Lalit Kala Akademi Fellowship in 1984, Kala Ratan by AIFACS (where the exhibition is being held from September 29-October 5, 2023), in 1991 and last but not the least the coveted Padma Shri in 1991. But as in the case of all artists these awards and fellowships are only a pale reflection of Professor Bisht’s body of work. I was privileged to witness the enormity of it in the process of curating this exhibition. Professor Bisht retired in 1989 as the Principal of the College of Arts, Lucknow.

We the family of Professor Ranbir Singh Bisht would like to take this opportunity to profusely thank eminent theatre personality Shri MK Raina for agreeing to be the Chief Guest and inaugurating the exhibition, AIFACS, New Delhi for promptly booking the art gallery and all its ancillary support by its staff, eminent Lucknow based photographer Shri Ravi Kapoor for taking the pain of personally taking pictures of the paintings for this catalogue, Nabyendu Paul, Delhi based artist, friends and family. curator’s note

How does one curate the work of an artist who left the mortal world two and a half decades ago, leaving behind an eclectic body of work that does not quite follow a linear progression, in terms of style and mediums both? One had to choose only twenty-five (25) paintings due to various constraints. That was not an easy task, when the art left behind is diverse and episodic in nature! When no ‘one’ phase of an artist naturally flows into the next, instead jumps from one to another, true to the free spirit of the artist.

After going through the entire body of work of Padma Shri Professor Ranbir Singh Bisht, what unfolds in chapters or phases, seems symptomatic of the tremendous amount of unharnessed energy he possessed. This perhaps points to his umbilical and subconscious connection to the ‘epic form’, a very ‘Indian’ phenomenon that is in sharp contrast to the falsity of temporal unity of the Aristotelean kind. Together these varied and loosely connected ‘phases’ form a ‘whole’ that may well be the most fair representation of Professor Bisht’s work. This reveals how monumental the exercise of curating can be. ‘The Signature’ of the artist has been the most important attribute of post-industrial modernity. It is an artist’s stamp on the strokes. No two painters are similar, is what the signature in modern art signifies. Each is an ‘auteur.’ But one sees a whole lot of paintings of Professor Bisht that are ‘unsigned’! What do they tell us? That he was unhappy with those? Or do they throw light on the process of arriving at merefined works in each phase?Or is the ‘unsigned’ symbolic of the ‘folk/rustic’ rootedness of Professor Bisht? Having known him from close I can certainly say he was an ‘uprooted’ spirit that remained ‘rooted’ to the place of his birth, Lansdowne, in the hills of erstwhile Uttar Pradesh now a part of Uttarakhand.

Folk is a collective expression of a society that never has the auteur’s signature. There are none in the paintings of Ajanta or the carvings of Ellora or the great narrative miniatures of classical Indian art. Having said that, unlike the narrative artists of Baroda School (inspired by our traditional schools of art like the miniatures of Pahari, Rajput, or Mughal) his paintings are neither narrative in nature, nor does he work with archetypes re-contextualized in the post-industrial world. Having said that he did paint a lot of miniatures. Once again, the polarities come to the fore in Professor Bisht’s works. He painted miniatures that were not narrative, at the same time he has several ‘unsigned’ works as well. Were these then, a tendency of normative push and pull between the collective and individual consciousness of an artist from a rural background working in an urban milieu? He was perhaps a huge mass of energy. As the great French film director, Robert Bresson once said that an artist should only ‘eel and respond’, not ‘stage’, Professor Bisht only ‘felt and responded’; or as the great Picasso once said, “when art critics meet, they talk of form, structure and meaning, when artists get together, they talk where you can buy cheap turpentine from.” Perhaps all tha mattered to Professor Bisht was turpentine and colors, the surface and the form were an extension of his expression.

The task of curating becomes even more difficult when the curator is an independent filmmaker, like myself. Painting and cinema are two diverse art forms. While paining is frozen time in space, cinema is both spatial and temporal, always on the move withing a given space. But cinema also needs a proficient visual sense much like any painter does. Often a ‘frame’ of a film is compared to a photograph or a painting, though these comparisons are hugely problematic. However, filmmakers have a long tradition of a symbiotic relationship with painters. For Robert Bresson it was Paul Cézanne, for Andrei Tarkovsky it was Peter Breughel and for Mani Kaul it was Amrita Shergill.

I personally resonate immensely with Professor Bisht’s ‘Blue Series’ a lot. There is an unparalleled refinement in them. A sense of maturity. The artist having found his moorings- and maybe one can describe them as ‘Magic Realism’ in art, if I may dare to categorize.

There are a couple of reasons why I would like to argue in favor of Magic Realism, which in the art of painting is more that a century old. If you see photographs of the hills of India, the pictures will be ‘blue’ and not green as expected. The reason for this could be refraction of light up in the mountains in the clean and clear air. In the ‘Blue series’ there is an uncanny photo-realism vis a vis the use of color in the series, but realism ends there in those works. What we get is an abstract flat surface of the mountain sans any depth or perspective! So while the color is realistic, the use of light a hallmark of Renaissance, Impressionism etc. is missing. Thus, the realistic and expressionistic or the abstract keep transforming into one another! The two aesthetics cohabit the same space in Professor Bisht’s world.

The second reason is a certain tendency of ‘reverse perspective’ in a lot of works of R.S. Bisht, especially the miniatures and smaller paintings. The objects far away from the surface of the painting are painted bigger than the ones in the foreground. One finds this regularly in his paintings. Infact, whenever Professor Bisht delves into realm of perspective and depth he blocks the line of vision. The fundamental of perspective where two lines meeting at infinity in each frame is subverted with the presence of a figure or an object, thus abstracting the image. The trees and people in those paintings are anyway devoid of any realistic depiction. They are figurative and clearly tilting towards the subjective than the objective!

Having said that, these features are predominantly present in his later works. Professor Bisht’s journey until the 80s to which the ‘Blue Series’ belongs is one where ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’. He starts with realistic representation of life and faces around him in the hills and then gradually moves towards a more expressionistic expression. It must have been impossible for any artist of Professor Bisht’s generation to circumvent the influence of Picasso, considering Professor Bisht had sufficient exposure to the west even in pre-internet days. We see a very brief period of cubist influence in his works. However, his spirit was always keen to challenge the artist within and knowing him, he would have soon felt the need to find his own voice. Which he did.

R.S. Bisht is primarily known as a landscape painter, but he never shied away from any medium or style, whether oil, wash or watercolor. Even the size of the painting did not matter to him, as you will see in the works on display in the gallery.

I personally knew him as a simmering ball of energy forever ready to release it in whatever form and medium available. Professor Bisht neither ceased to feel nor respond!

This 25th death anniversary commemorative exhibition is curated keeping in mind the diversity of Professor Bisht’s work. The paintings on display represent almost all, important phases of his work. From the ‘Blue Series to Lust, Headless in Lucknow, Inscapes, Unwanted, wash, watercolors and miniatures.’ Twenty-five paintings are for the 25 years of his mortal absence, but spirit lives on in our collective memory and his art. We, his family sincerely hope that this exhibition resonates with the visitors to this exhibition and somewhere we realize our own insignificance in the larger cosmic design, much like those solitary figures in his art.

SHARAD RAJ
Son-in-law, Independent Filmmaker & Teacher

Profile Continued

GROUP EXHIBITIONS:
RS BISHT PARTICIPATED IN NATIONAL
EXHIBITIONS AND OTHER ALL INDIA
EXHIBITIONS FOR FOUR DECADES.
INTERNATIONAL LEVEL PARTICIPATION:
MINIATURE 70,INTERNATIONAL GALLERIES,
FRANKFURT, WEST GERMANY (1970)
INDIAN PAINTING, NATIONAL MUSEUM OF
MODERN ARTS, TOKYO, JAPAN (1970)
11TH SAO-PAULO BIENNALE, BRAZIL (1971)
4TH TRIENNALE – INTERNATIONAL, INDIA (1972)
ASIAN ART SHOW, FUKUOKA, JAPAN (1989)
AWARDS:
PADMA AWARDS: PADMA SHRI (1991)
KALA RATAN, AIFACS, NEW DELHI(1991)
FELLOW OF NATIONAL LALIT KALA AKADEMI (1988)
FELLOW OF U.P. STATE LALIT KALA AKADEMI (1984)
UNESCO FELLOWSHIP FOR VISUAL ARTS (1967-68)
NATIONAL EXHIBITION AWARD (1965)