Jatin Das is still fond of those days when creative aspirations flourished collectively. Those were the days, when artists supported each other and the world of visual art wasn’t what it has become now – an aggressive market place. These undesirable changes have made the Delhi-based artist extremely sad, and also a bit aloof. “I miss those days, but this is life. We are now living in a different milieu and things have changed,” says Das.
He has always been an outlier. Someone who renounced fame and became a witness to the transformations the art world has gone through.
In his illuminating six-decade career, he has always taken the road less travelled and given art lovers a large body of work that has covered all trajectories, starting from painting to drawing and from sculptures to murals. No matter how much he tries to stay away from the media glare and let his work and achievements speak, he comes in the spotlight one way or the other.
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First, it was his site-specific 30-foot sculpture of welded steel titled, “The Flight of Steel” that was removed from the roundabout in Bhilai in Chhattisgarh in 2012 and in the recent times it is his stolen painting by an ex-Air India employee that has brought the focus on him again. “Art is in news only when something happens in Delhi, Mumbai or Kolkata, no one is bothered about what is happening in other parts of the country. Also, the focus comes on art when something different takes place like when my sculpture vanished or when my painting was stolen,” laments the Padma Bhushan recipient.
But this time he is in news for a different reason altogether. He is exhibiting over 500 portraits, probably the biggest ever display of portraits, in an exhibition titled, “Jatin Das: Artists and Friends. Over Fifty Years” that features intimate and carefully drawn sketches of stalwarts from varied fields and features drawings of artists like Jairam Patel, Bhupen Khakhar, Raghu Rai and Bikash Battacharya among others.
“I have shared a close relationship with all the people I have featured here. There was a time when I wouldn’t do a portrait unless I knew the person, personally. This is why these portraits have a sense of intimacy. I have tried to bring out their characteristics in these drawings,” he says, adding that the portraits are spread over 50 years of his oeuvre and many of them go back to early 60s and some are done in 2017.
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“I found a portrait of Ram Kinker Baij that I did in 1962, which he signed and there is a recent one of a friend of mine,” he adds. However, one thing that upsets him is the fact that the art of portraiture is slowly diminishing. “Today everything is done as a quickie. All we are doing is going to a mall and creating a superficial generation of people,” he rues.
Sense of nostalgia
Hence his show builds a sense of nostalgia, not only for Jatin but also for the viewers. The show wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for the young artist and his pupil, Aalap Shah, admits Jatin. “When I was shifting my studio from Shahpur Jat to Mehrauli, Aalap found hundreds of portraits done by me, in oils, water colours, ink and conte. This was something that has never been showcased before and we thought it would be a good idea to showcase them,” says Das whose mural, “The Journey of India: Mohenjodaro to Mahatma Gandhi” is in the Parliament Annexe.
“Even though I don’t like to exhibit, but as an artist, you have to showcase because otherwise people think that Jatin isn’t painting any more,” he chuckles.
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On a serious note, he adds, “While I have never been part of any group and am more of a loner, one thing that is gratifying is that I have never compromised on my ethics. In fact, I am the only artist among my contemporaries who doesn’t have a house of my own. This is because I have been passionately collecting art and antiquities and have the biggest Pankha collection. When I sell a painting, I use only 10 percent for my survival, the rest is utilised on my foundation, JD Centre of Art.” Das has a magnificent collection of over 6,000 pankhas, making it one of the largest private collections in the world. While he is accommodating them all in his Mehrauli studio, he is willing to donate them, if a proposal for a national Pankha museum comes his way. “There was a talk but nothing concrete has come up yet.”
Art as commodity
The one thing about the art world that he completely despises is the fact that “art has become a business and a commodity.” “This was not there before,” he remarks. “Today, it is all about how much you are selling for. Everyone is only talking about money and price of the art. No one is interested in informing themselves about the vision, content and rendering of the art forms. We are becoming isolated islands that have no interaction with one another.”
He signs off with a piece of advice. “We are a great country with wonderful cultural wealth, but we will lose it all if we don’t make art a cultural movement of our country.”
(The exhibition can be viewed at the Lalit Kala Akademi, Rabindra Bhavan, New Delhi till November 22)
