Untitled (Baul)

Jamini Roy was trained in Western academic-realist painting that he shunned in favour of the clean lines, earthy colours and vitality of local folk arts. However, he wasn’t totally oblivious of the global trends in art. This rare terracotta work is perhaps his nod to European modernism as he has used a distinctively cubist vocabulary to depict a Baul singer. The Bauls—folk minstrels of Bengal—are as integral a part of the region’s local traditions as the patuas whose artistic vocabulary Roy was inspired by. The division of the disc into two parts, too, is an unusual feature of the artist’s oeuvre.