City of Anxiety

This work is from a well-known, eponymous series by Bijan Chowdhury that he began painting in 1965-66, in response to the despair and anxiety on the streets of Calcutta due to epochal socio-political flux in West Bengal. The stretched limbs of the skeletal, bare-bodied figures not only express the reality of the humble class but also the limits to which its endurance is stretched and tested by events and situations not of its making. The tonal quality of the greenish-black core on a yellow background is symbolic of the darkness closing in upon helpless people.