Untitled

In his later years, Nandalal Bose—who was commissioned by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru to illustrate the first copy of the Constitution of India—adopted a reductionist approach, tending to abstraction. These were best seen in his paper collages, such as the one here. This Untitled work combines his love for nature with earlier exposure to the linear idiom of Japanese art in creating an animal that resembles a bear. He pastes the drawing on paper with its ‘torn’ silhouette, on another sheet of paper, providing us a glimpse of his abstractionist thought process.