It would not be an exaggeration to suggest that Menon has contributed to the aesthetic vocabulary of Indian art with her distinctive female nude – a melancholic figure whose latent sensuality is matched by a yearning that tugs at the viewer with an empathetic resonance. The artist’s forte is her ability, in her more painterly work, to evoke subterranean emotions and associations that take the subject of her painting and the viewer out of the frame. It is that which is suggested elliptically and subtly invoked by negation that imbues Menon’s work with a very special visual texture. More often than not her paintings hint at a magical, dream world – a very private domain that the artist inhabits with her enigmatic people, animals, birds and in one phase – the lizard. The images of ordinary objects - like the chair, the crow, the open window, the picture within the picture, the chequerboard, the serpent – recur so often that they achieve the status of symbol – as do the small embellishments that are now synonymous with her signature.

Menon’s paintings of the 1960s were marked by a complex mix of untrammeled passion leavened with the pensive. In the next decade, formal art schooling first in Bombay at the J.J. School of Art and later in Paris, studying fresco at the Ecole des Beaux Arts and the exposure to the modern art movement in Europe imparted a degree of rigor to her work. Personal experience is an important ingredient in her oeuvre. Her extensive travels in Italy, France and Spain and an exposure to Byzantine art in Greece left the lasting impact of early Christian art on her work. Her style was marked by the luster of Byzantine art and the Romanesque influences were noticeable. Apart from the brooding nude, her subject matter included priests tinged with an ecclesiastical severity and haunting madonnas - the Slavic overtones reflecting an allegorical narrative quality. Gradually the synthesis of different cultures took place – perhaps giving visual quality to the transmutations that were taking place within Menon’s own personal life as she grappled with the awareness engendered by her multiple identities. The relentless exploration saw the artist create a seemingly incongruous juxtaposition of subject matter that hinted at shades of Hieronymus Bosch and the Pre- Raphaelites. Nubile, diaphanously clad women – only half revealed, animals, birds, reptiles and the apocalyptic male figures inhabited and impinged upon a mythical world that was excavated from the artist’s sub-conscious.

Yet this imagery did not relate to any identifiable collective myth and in a more introspective moment, the artist noted of these paintings: “It is a lonely moonscape of my own making, trespassed upon by the occasional bird or animal, and the protagonist is often the person I yearn to touch, the person I long to be.” Gradually her work acquired a stamp of individual authenticity and a distinctive signature.

A stint in the former Soviet Union in the late 60s and her Bangladesh series of 1971 reflect an acute artistic sensitivity to the external stimulus, in as much as the series of paintings of close family friends and her current interaction with the inhabitants of the Nizamuddin basti (the urban village in Delhi where she has her studio) testify to the centrality of her individual vision. In the current portfolio, the internalized distillation of a young woman grappling with her variegated experiences and emotions is perhaps discernible in painting number seven. Several elements in this autobiographical painting are combined to establish a certain signature that is still valid in her current work. The modern red windows open on to an ancient courtyard which may be indicative of the period when Menon was deeply conscious of the divide between inner and outer spaces. The window looking out on to unattainable locations where the trapped woman and the seated goat hint at gender vulnerability even while locating the vignette within the specificity of the Indian context.

Desolation is a quality that is palpable in many of Menon’s paintings and again, one may infer that a sense of loss imbues some of her work a distinctive elegiac texture. The forlorn figure gazing into the distance through a window is a recurring motif as the artist made a transition to a more innovative mixed-media approach. The painted window yielded to the real window, the ‘objet trouve’ resurrected. The actuality of the window and its irreverent ornate nature connects the viewer to a grid of fractured spaces and multiple images. In the most realized works of this genre, Menon once again evokes that which is hinted at but not quite visually stated even as the unsung ode wafts across disturbing landscapes. In the window painting in this portfolio a solitary eye peers through a rent in the curtain hinting at narratives unsung.

While the window, the crow or the chair recurred through the 1980s slowly allegory gave way to a more direct engagement with subjects close to the artist. Her marriage into a Malayali family, and the discovery of a stack of daguerro-type early photographs in her husband’s ancestral home in Kerala, seem to have spurred a series of paintings. Malayali ancestors and young ascetic poojaris drawn from the cultural backdrop of South India appear in sepia tones in her paintings of that period.

In the portfolio, the painting ‘Shankaran Kutty’s Birthday’ is representative of this phase. In Kerala, on a child’s birthday he is washed after an aromatic oil bath, dressed in a gold bordered kasava mundu, decked out in special jewels (which were made specifically for small boys) and then taken to the temple to be blessed. The fidelity to detail is striking and the innocence of the child is both framed and sheltered within the protective confines of the Nair taravad house.

The 1990s were marked by a period of experimentation and creative innovation which saw a bold departure from her earlier work. At the time she said “.. artists are often trapped in the clichés of their own making... I seem to have spent the last decade struggling to come out of the trap.” In 1992 Menon turned to an unlikely source – the ubiquitous kabadiwala of urban India. In a show entitled ‘Follies in Fantastikal Furniture’, she broke new ground in the idiom of contemporary Indian art by resurrecting junk. An old chair consigned to the flea market was salvaged and adorned with the visage of a film star in gaudy Bollywood attire that would have normally been seen on a street hoarding. This Kamalahasan chair epitomized Menon’s contention that art should come off its high pedestal, while reiterating her conviction that “sometimes funny is serious...”

Menon’s conviction and courage in leaving the safety of her preferred medium – oil on masonite was fraught with considerable uncertainty. Here was a well established artist making a bold departure from the safety of the traditional two dimensional format to chart completely unexplored territory. However the experiment succeeded and the famous art critic, the late Krishna Chaitanya, remarked at the time that it was rewarding for the viewer to: “share the mood in which she has created them...... of venturing into new directions, inspired by the modern, post-modern, post everything spirit of relentless enquiry that probes fresh perspectives without any prior fanatical commitment.” In the next few years discarded chairs, tables, boxes and metal trunks were taken off junk heaps and resurrected... little seemed to escape the eye of the artist in imparting these objects with an aesthetic identity and autonomy. In her inimitably impish manner, Menon had coalesced the traditional and the post- modern with rare panache, a full decade before the advent of installation art in India.

This phase of radical new innovation continued into the mid 1990s with Menon’s foray into computer-aided images. These were amongst the first digitally enabled images in India, and Menon mounted the exhibition entitled ‘Mutations’ in New York, Delhi and Mumbai. In retrospect, it may be averred that this exhibition was apparently ahead of its times in the Indian milieu and consequently treated with a degree of skepticism - though readily accepted in the New York show of 1998. With the spate of digitally generated art that has now flooded the contemporary art scene, Menon’s pioneering departure stands vindicated. The painting included in the portfolio is an example of the highly complex nature of the imagery created by morphing two or more of her own paintings. The super-imposition of diverse images, using computer tools, photography and collage, painted over with acrylics, oils and ink, resulted in an impressive tour de force where unexpected juxtapositions intrigue the viewer who is already flooded with the digitized imagery of the post modern world. While the seeming spontaneity of the resultant image heightens the element of surprise, the degree of chance engendered by the tools of information technology liberates it from its more familiar moorings. Nude, serpent, boy and reptile remake themselves repeatedly, giving birth to unrecognizable mutants which claim a life and pedigree of their own. Underlying the slick surfaces of the totally new compu-picture are echoes of the artist’s earlier work, reinforcing those elements that have been associated with the Menon idiom while achieving a new sense of scale and intriguing complexity.

The next digression finds the artist turning to the non-figurative for the first time. Inspired by the Buddhist iconography of Ladakh, the continuous oral chanting of the mantra is transmuted into a repetitive litany and these meditative paintings of 1998-99 evoke metonymic reverberations as the viewer connects in a sub-conscious manner to the sacred. In the same period of the late 1990s, Menon appeared to do a volte face when she chose to explore the possibilities of glass. Her long standing ‘riyaaz’ with paint was temporarily placed on hold and the glass blower’s skills challenged her creativity. Did the delicate and fragile nature of the new medium impel her in this direction? Working in Murano, Italy with local Venetian maestri, Menon created a body of exquisite crystal sculptures - aptly entitled ‘The Sacred Prism’ series. The austere precision of the finished sculpture is sensuously beautiful and the introduction of Indian motifs provides the cross-cultural context.

In 2002, Menon was looking at a new source of inspiration - kitsch in its Indian ubiquity. Calendar art that is so distinctively pan-Indian and cinema hoardings that dot the urban and small town landscape are transmuted with confident painterliness and within the rich and translucent palette that defines Menon’s empathy with colour. The much derided popular visual culture that informs the lives of millions is baptized affectionately into the framework of contemporary art. After her historic exhibition ‘Gods and Others’ Menon’s engagement with kitsch and the visual matrix of urban India in our times has made a lasting impression on Indian art. Many younger artists have either appropriated or been influenced by this genre, thereby celebrating kitsch and bringing it steadily into the mainstream. In the painting included in the portfolio, Menon parodies both calendar art and the circus where a male figure is being sawn in half while a be-spectacled Shiva-like figure looks on with detached impassivity. In another painting from this collection, a many-armed goddess holds aloft the head of the modern demon Veerappan.

It would be misleading to suggest that artists work in discrete phases and that the movement from one phase or genre to another is linear and exclusive. An overlap is inherently subjective and over a distinctive five decade period, a visual signature emerges over time. In Menon’s case it is her natural harmony with color and the finely layered surfaces that are recognizable. Menon once noted, “I hardly draw. I think in color. It’s depth or intensity, translucence or opacity form the nuances of my whole creative output. It is with color that one sings, with color that one plummets the depths. When I dream I see color... the overlaying of harmony, discord, syncopation...”

The orchestration of all the elements that inform Menon’s deepest concerns were on display at a major retrospective exhibition mounted in Mumbai in 1988 in collaboration with the Times of India. Later in 2002, a larger traveling retrospective of her work was on view at the NGMA in Mumbai, the Chitrakala Parishath in Bangalore and the Lalit Kala Akademi in Delhi. Invited to the Sao Paulo Biennale in 1989, she has also participated in various Indian Triennales. Her murals adorn many public buildings in India including the Reserve Bank of India. A book on her work entitled, “Anjolie Ela Menon: Paintings in Private collections” has been produced as well as films for Doordarshan and CNN.

In recognition of her stature, the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco had mounted a solo show of her work in mid 2006 which celebrated Menon’s triptych ‘Yatra’ in a six month long exhibition. Menon is a recipient of the Padma Sri National Award and her work hangs in the permanent collections of the NGMA, the Peabody Essex Museum, the Chandigarh Museum, the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco and in many private collections in India and abroad.

C Uday Bhaskar