Girl Waiting

In the 1950s, many of the artists were creating paintings that seemed inspired by the lyrical cubism of N. S. Bendre, eventually to be abandoned as they found a distinctive language of their own. Most abstractionists too began their career with figuration, and this painting by Biren De—who, later, became one of the most important painters of the neo-tantra school—is an example of the nature of work with which he began his career. The brooding girl is rendered in cubist angles, but the work comes alive in the expressionist brush strokes that define a field of wheat or corn by which the girl waits, perhaps, for her beloved.