Untitled

Ramkinkar Baij is one of the most important modernist artists of the twentieth century. He made sketches, paintings, etchings and drawings, but is perhaps best known for the sculptures he developed at Kala Bhavana, which was the fine arts department of Visva-Bharati University, established by the Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore. He learned from artists like Nandalal Bose and later became a member of the faculty himself. In this untitled work he paints a gruesome image of human suffering. Three vultures surround the carcass of a deceased person. With shrivelled skin giving way to bone, the corpse bears the signs of famine-affected undernourishment. Painted in grey with a splattering of red, the image evokes the bleakness of the human condition. Not only was death a constant at the time, the horrifying visual on display documents a grotesque norm of the time when corpses were left on the streets to rot or be consumed by scavengers.