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 his smaller etchings, like the one here, he attempted to convey the mood of a setting or the intimacy of a close encounter. The crepuscular world of the street-scene is dominated by the eye of the moon in the background, conveying a sense of both danger and surreptitious freedom under the cover of darkness.