There is beauty in chaos. Veteran artist P Gopinath’s foyer says as much. His home in Chennai’s Cholamandal Artists’ Village is bright with canvases. His worktable spills over with half-empty tubes of paint, colour stained palettes, and brushes. The creative chaos is a condensed picture of Cholamandal Artists Village at its core — a 10-acre stretch by the sea that nurtured a vibrant creative community. The cradle of the iconic Madras Art Movement, from the 1950s to ‘80s.
This story begins 56 years ago, in an open, sandy stretch of land by the sea, lined with casuarina trees. Today, it is home to a mighty banyan tree, as old as the commune itself and the people who planted it, who then worked beneath its spreading branches.
Artists of Cholamandal at the beach, in the early days
Cholamandal began in 1966 with over 30 resident artists. While, some of the pioneers still have homes here, with land prices in the areas rising rapidly, many have sold their property or moved out and the composition changes constantly. Today 40 residences are in this settlement. Only five of the original settlers remain, apart from the families of artists who have passed on.
Intrigued by the many untold stories of the pioneers, we spend a day with the last masters of the Madras Art Movement: the artists who lived and worked here from the 1960s, speak about their idyllic home, the idea of community and how Cholamandal has shaped Indian art.
Top row: M Senathipathi, KR Harie, KCS Paniker, J Sultan Ali, SP.Jayakar, Mumtaz; Bottom row: P Gopinath, S Paramasivam, SG Vasudev, and Jayapal Panicker | Photo Credit: SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT
Thatched huts and bullock carts
In the sixties, KCS Paniker, then principal of the Government College of Arts, advised his students to think of alternate ways to earn income through their art. “After graduation, many talented artists were lost in the crowd. There were no galleries where we could exhibit and sell. Many began to go into advertising, and painting cinema hoardings… Paniker was probably the only artist who understood our struggles,” says Gopinath, 76, current president of the Artists Handicrafts Association and one of the founding members of Cholamandal.
Senior artist P Gopinath at his residence in Cholamandal Artists Village | Photo Credit: Akhila Easwaran
Paniker inspired them by telling stories: of how, during the Second World War, art students in Madras bundled their artworks in sarees or sacks and went door to door, trying to sell them for a livelihood.
He then suggested working as a commune: an experimental and largely Eurocentric concept. He also advised the young artists to break away from looking at art as niche and upskill to work with craft. Gopinath recalls, “Modern contemporary art was not understood and was very difficult to sell. It was new to many.”
They were given a floor to work on at the State Academy.. “We started with batik (wax-resist dyeing from Indonesia),” narrates Gopinath as he unfurls a dark mauve fabric sprinkled with lighter, batik patterns.
He continues, “In 1965, we put up an exhibition that sold out for ₹50,000. We were overjoyed! What do we do with that much money?” They decided to put 10% of the earnings into investing in a space they could live and work in.
“At the time, an acre was priced at ₹4,500 on the East Coast. We bought the land with half the money, then bought material for cottages, and a borewell,” says Gopinath. Injambakkam was a fishing hamlet then, an outpost with no road connectivity. The artists often walked to Tiruvanmiyur to board the bus or travelled in bullock carts.
KCS Paniker (centre) with Arnawaz (left) and SG Vasudev (Right)
Thatched huts were erected and the first cohort of seven artists arrived. In a few years, this number catapulted to over 30 , the founding members, hailed today as pioneers of a modern idiom in Indian art that was still largely rooted in tradition. They included J Sultan Ali, KR Harie, SP Jayakar, Kannayi Kunhiraman, M Redappa Naidu, SG Vasudev, S Gopal, Anila Jacob, KM Vasudevan Namboothiri, C Venkatapathy, V Arnawaz, V Viswanadhan, Akkitham Narayanan, P K Gangadharan (Peter Ganga), PV Janakiram, Jayapal Panicker, M J Peter, S Paramasivam, M V Devan, R Sarangan, TMV Namboodiri, K Ramanujam, Richard Jesudoss, K V Haridasan, K M Gopal and others.
Some lived in the huts, while others travelled from the city daily. M Senathipathi, 84, was among the latter. “I would travel from Saidapet every day, work till the evening and then go back. If I did painting or drawing for a week, I would do metal reliefs the next,” he says.
This routine is so entrenched in his life that, today even at 86, he works from 11am till the evening at his Cholamandal studio, where he now lives. “It’s like going to office for me,” chuckles the artist. “It is like a temple for all of us. Amaidi (peace)!”.
Between chiselling a new-found piece of white granite, 84-year-old sculptor PS Nandhan echoes this sentiment. “When you plant something in moderate shade, you will notice that it grows well, no? That is why Cholamandal works. If you just peep over the wall, you will see [C] Douglas walking by, while on the other side, you can see Gopinath or Latha [Gopal]. Seeing them cultivates inspiration,” says Nandhan.
Early gallery in the campus
Artist Latha Gopal fondly reminisces her childhood days spent under the banyan tree with her late father and artist KS Gopal. Uma Shankar, C Venkatapathy’s son, joins in. “It was fascinating to grow up around artists. We could go up and ask them anything.”
By the beginning of the new millennium (2000), the numbers of the resident founding artists of Cholamandal dwindled and only a handful still lived on the campus with their families. That was when S Nandagopal, sculptor and Paniker’s son, realised the need for a museum to showcase the contribution of the Madras Art Movement in contemporary Indian art.
“2009, therefore, was a milestone in the history of Cholamandal Artists’ Village with the establishment of the Cholamandal Centre for Contemporary Art (CCCA) which houses the KCS Paniker Museum of the Madras Movement along with the Cholamandal Gallery, two commercial galleries for any artist to rent, an open international sculpture park surrounding the complex and guest houses and studios for visiting artists,” says Pallavi Nandagopal, member, who documents and archives both her late father Nandagopal and grandfather Paniker’s bodies of work.
Looking forward
Cholamandal was initially visualised by Paniker as a “one-generation experimental venture”. Of the 30 founding members, only 12 remain of which, only five artists now live in Cholamandal. Others have relocated. Douglas equates Cholamandal to Homi Baba’s concept of the ‘third space’, as a site for translations and negotiations. “These negotiations were really happening at Cholamandal among us, in true nomadic spirit,” adds Douglas; though many of them agree that they did have their disagreements on varied counts.
PS Nandhan at work | Photo Credit: Akhila Easwaran
As ECR and Injambakkam, in particular, continues to be hot property, more non-artist residents have started occupying the space. Homes are being brought down and new ones, with more modern aesthetics, are being erected, and Cholamandal’s landscape is fast changing.
While the residing artists are still nostalgic about the past, they are also practical about the future. They believe that the space has done what it needed to do. However, the core of what Cholamandal was, and its contributions to the Indian modernist movement will live on through the Centre, says Pallavi. “We are working on some ideas to make the space self sustainable,” adds Latha.
When German sculptor Thomas Link fashioned his abstract sculpture in 1990 in the sculpture park next to the banyan tree, he wanted its roots to envelop this piece of art. They now have. The tree now stands tall, as a silent witness to a near-fading commune that created a movement in art history that Madras can and should proudly call its own.
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