PROLOGUE
Even if the grief and shock of Bhupen Khakhar's so recent death still presses, some perspectives are immediately clarified. Setting out to write on his painting seven years ago, it seemed important to explore his cultural and intellectual formation, the convergence of several different voices which shaped the "Baroda" climate. With his death, however, his art already seems to stand distinct from any notion of a Baroda School, just as the strange trajectory of his career detaches itself from the Indian contemporary art scene.
Last year's superb Madrid retrospective confirmed Khakhar's international stature, most evident in such large-scale panoramas as You Can't Please All and The Goldsmith. Earlier, in View from a Teashop and Man with Bouquet of Plastic Flowers, he'd first achieved that exceptional clarity and definition which raised the "ordinary" into the visionary. Transferred to icons of homosexual love, Khakhar's language would reach urgently beyond India and into the consciousness of people all over the world.
He often tried to escape from the imprisoning slow processes of his oil-painting idiom, creating wonderfully light-hearted watercolours and some splendid etchings.
In a period of blurred eyesight he brushed more expressively; there are some violent late images; and forays into ceramics, installation, glass-painting, as well as short stories and a play. But it is the calm radiance of his larger canvases that carries the deepest charge. So courageous and exemplary in his life, Khakhar affirms in his work the continuing potency of pigment as a medium of transformation.
Timothy Hyman
London, 30 September, 2003
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