Growing up was an “immersive experience” for Gauri Krishnan. Paintings, music, books… her Vadodara household was steeped in art which included, in the 1980s, a series of skulls her abstractionist father, Ratan Parimoo, painted even as her printmaker mother, Naina Dalal, asked him to stop. “The surrealist skulls were frightening to others,” recalls Krishnan, “but, as his kids, my sister and I found them really funny.”Now an art curator based in Singapore, Krishnan is currently at the NGMA as a spokesperson for the 89-year-old Padma Shri-winning art historian she calls ‘Parimoo sir’ and the 90-year-old feminist she refers to as ‘Naina ma’am’. Here, two parallel shows, Sept 11 till Oct 12, revisit the distinct journeys of this dynamic duo that left distinct handprints on Indian modernism while sharing a roof.“Parimoo’s abstract canvases mark one of the earliest and most audacious departures from figuration in post-independence India,” says curator Girish Shahane about the artist whose 40 paintings showcase his experiments with line in Jain and Egyptian paintings between 1958 and 1973. Dalal, whose 150 works on view include the haunting ‘Maa Mujhe Jeene Do’, “forged her own path with equal mastery in painting and printmaking at a time when women artists were a rarity,” says Shahane, noting that her small-format wash paintings are being exhibited for the first time.Born in 1936 in Srinagar, Parimoo grew up sketching everything around him, including the elaborate costumes of his relatives. “I am a Kashmiri Brahmin. The women are colloquially called Batni. So, people would say ‘yeh batni banata hai’,” he recalls. Parimoo briefly studied science before life nudged him toward art when his father brought home the prospectuses of JJ School of Art, Shantiniketan and Baroda’s new Faculty of Fine Arts.On moving to Gujarat in 1951, he was drawn to abstraction through professor NS Bendre’s demonstrations and post-war European art books. “I got wedded to the visual arts as a lifetime preoccupation,” he says, having sketched at railway stations and studied aesthetics for eight years before co-founding the Baroda Group with Bendre, KG Subramanyan, Balkrishna Patel, Shanti Dave and Jyoti Bhatt. “We were an enthusiastic bunch, well trained and filled with dreams to find our place in the art world. Though very few artists were practicing abstraction in the late 1950s, we felt we were already part of a global conversation.” Unlike the Progressives of Bombay, their embrace of modernism, he notes, was “not about rejecting the past. We were looking for things in Indian miniature painting that were compatible with modernist sensibilities and built up from it.”Along with a “naukri” as lecturer at the Faculty of Fine Arts, he also landed a “chokri” in the ‘strong-headed’ Dalal. “I was determined to marry an artist,” he says. Soon after marriage, the couple travelled through Europe and the US on a Commonwealth scholarship. While he was smitten by Picasso, Dalal was drawn to lithography. “I had learnt printmaking in Vadodara. But in London, I found the opportunity to learn advanced printmaking very tempting,” says Vadodara-born Dalal. The title of her retrospective ‘Naina Dalal: The Silent Fire Within’ “captures the angst within me and my characters,” says the 90-year-old, whose brush focused on lives marked by struggle and resilience. In her series on female foeticide, one canvas shows an infant in the tight squeeze of a giant palm.Her persona challenges were endless. As someone who painted nude portraits when only men did so, Dalal found her works lauded in the West and ignored in India. Besides drawing attention to Dalal’s enduring etchings on the first wave of feminism, NGMA director Nidhi Chaudhari highlights Parimoo’s influence, citing his recent Padma Shri. “The recognition brings me full circle,” says Parimoo, though he wishes it had also acknowledged his 2010 study of the three Tagores.Even now, he is restless. In a handwritten note to TOI, the veteran detailed the guiding principle of his life: Ceaseless Creativity. “I am now exploring figuration,” he says. As enduring social evils keep Dalal’s works relevant, she hopes her paintings inspire the young to be true to their art. Meanwhile, unlike Krishnan’s psychologist sister, who chides the trio saying “You art people occupy an ivory tower”, life continues to be an immersive experience for this Baroda group.
