Surendranath De (1930–1982) – informally known as Suren De – was among the most gifted sculptors of his generation, though he never received the recognition his work deserved. Among senior practitioners, and especially among those who studied with him, he is remembered with genuine appreciation as an extraordinary talent lost too early, barely in his early fifties. It is not surprising, then, that his name should summon a vivid image of an earlier chapter in the history of modern Indian art, and of Santiniketan in particular. Yet what that name evokes is more than nostalgia. His was an era animated by the energies of early and mid-twentieth-century artists, almost all of whom were, in their own ways, committed to the making of a modern Indian art – a time of grand ideals, when artists searched with real urgency for the appropriate parameters and visual vocabularies of their practice. It was also a time of intensifying debate, as questions about the premises of art pedagogy unfolded alongside persistent efforts to redefine modernism on Indian terms, transcending the dilemma of choosing between nationalism and modernism, between the Oriental and the Western. The significance of Suren De is best located within this context, and for more reasons than one. Despite a short career, he deserves reappraisal both individually and contextually. If he made important contributions to his time, his time also played an essential role in shaping him as a sculptor. Suren De returns to us today with the critical acclaim that ought to have been his long ago.
A quick glance at his available sculptures, although modest in number, reveals his natural inclination for elemental and formal explorations and a keen sensitivity to the medium and material, accompanied by subtle twists and playfulness – propensities that transform simple subject-matters and ordinary forms into curious and engaging sculptural configurations. What may appear as stylistic instability across his oeuvre is, on the contrary, a telling sign of an artist dedicated to an artistic quest trying to comprehend and negotiate the new challenges of Indian modernism. Thus, the apparent disparity in his works and the absence of the much sought-after linguistic consistency can be understood, in real terms, as a significant indicator of a sculptor deeply committed to the proverbial search for a modernist identity in his works. Marked by experimentations and trials, Suren De’s works embody that quintessential pursuit for modernity vis-à-vis Indian-ness that defined most of the artists working in post-Independence India, squarely aligning his work with the broader cultural activism and nation-building ethos of the 1950s – a decade that witnessed the emergence of a new cohort of young artists trained in the country’s several art colleges. Many of them, at their early stages of career and during their formative phases evidently resisted any obligation to a single style agenda or a pre-ordained idiom. They shared the spirit of discovery and Suren De was certainly one of them.
De’s practice is undeniably rooted in the open-ended and all-embracing pedagogy of Kala Bhavana, Santiniketan in the mid-1950s. Trained under Ramkinkar Baij – the path-breaking pioneer of a post-realist modern Indian sculptural idiom, and who started the department of sculpture informally in 1932 – Suren De belonged to a small circle of students in the sculpture department, senior and junior, including Avtar Singh Panwar and Sushen Ghosh respectively, who would move on to become distinguished sculptors and teachers in their own right. Profoundly inspired by Ramkinkar’s teaching, both Panwar and Ghosh ventured into hitherto uncharted paths, seeking to articulate their artistic objectives afresh rather than achieving the preset goals. Suren De displays a similar enthusiasm, transforming the making of sculpture into an act of probing instead of repeating pre-conceived forms and ideas. For him, to study under Ramkinkar was to learn not merely modelling and subjective representations of observed visual facts, but also conceptualizing and constructing; to see human and non-human entities as independent structures in themselves, shaped as much by Santiniketan’s red soil as by formal and technical training.
Born in Tripura, Suren De arrived at Santiniketan with an insatiable urge to learn about art, to explore a range of mediums, and to hone his skills through sustained practice. His inclination to probe new ideas and venture into uncharted territory found an uninhibited compass in Kala Bhavana’s liberated atmosphere – an environment that encouraged curiosity, experimentation, and a dialogue between tradition and innovation, between the natural setting and the social milieu. Alongside instructions in traditional arts and crafts, the teaching programme placed special emphasis on nature study, asserting that nature and the objective environment around us constitute a vital and most rewarding source of visual knowledge. This orientation towards close observation and sensory engagement helped shape generations of artists who sought to ground modernist aspirations in lived experience and material sensitivity, often permeated with expressionist verve and topical references.
When Suren De joined Kala Bhavana as a student, the institution was little more than three decades old and firmly under the leadership of Nandalal Bose. As an educator, Nandalal’s primary concern was the art scene he wished to build – for himself and for others. The pedagogy and art practice of Kala Bhavana at its initial stage were largely shaped by Nandalal, whose broad perspective saved him and his institute from any form of insularism. Exposure to the artistic traditions of other cultures and supplementary discursive studies were therefore considered essential components of the curriculum. For example, Visva-Bharati was formally established in 1921 and in the same year, the celebrated Viennese art historian Stella Kramrisch was invited to Santiniketan to deliver a series of lectures on Western art movements from Impressionism to Cubism. Kramrisch’s visit was followed by many others including the Viennese sculptor Miss Liza von Pott; and Mrs. Milward, a student of the French sculptor Bourdelle. Alongside these international exchanges, Nandalal invited indigenous artists and craftsmen to demonstrate their skills and artistic processes. It is important to reiterate these well-known facts because they bring us to Kala Bhavana’s focus on the roots of art, emphasizing its constituent factors, re-examining traditional logic, and discovering fresh methods to address new circumstances. Suren De’s experiments with representational norms and styles were intrinsically tied to this creative environment built by Nandalal and the sculpting methods he learned from Ramkinkar – namely, that each medium and technique should be addressed differently, responding to the unique problems and possibilities inherent in them. This was imaginable primarily because of the liberal and experimental ambience of Kala Bhavana itself.
Upon completing his studies, and after a short stint as a teacher in the same department Suren De left India for Nigeria in the mid-1960s, where he spent nearly two decades teaching art. He returned to his alma mater as a faculty member in 1980, shortly after Ramkinkar Baij's death that same year, treading, in effect, into the space his own teacher had left behind, thus stepping into his new role as a teacher and practitioner with renewed vigor, refreshing his studio practice with mutually complementing attentions to material and form.
At a descriptive level, De’s sculpted figures, mostly human, occasionally non-human, are firmly built rather than softly modelled – planes and facets meeting and intersecting, geometric masses balancing each other, forms holding themselves with quiet resilience in a timeless zone, as it were. Within this structural rigor runs an unmistakable expressionist current, a tilt of the head, a tension in the torso, that keeps the work from ever feeling merely academic or plain narrative. These are not heroic figures in the monumental sense, but enduring ones: of labor, of grace, of grit, of the daily grind. This particular tendency has led Suren De to explore new sculptural possibilities to resolve the archetypical conflicts between geometry and expressive quality, between thematic preference and formal concerns. Mediums as varied as terracotta, concrete, cement, metal and wood lend themselves to De’s objectives where structural issues and thematic concerns ask for same concentration.
However, De is remarkably aware of the different demands as he switches from a single head portrait sculpture to a composite group of figures, for instance. While the marks and progressive stages of sculpting are obviously palpable in both these works from the early 1980s, he approaches them otherwise. He takes special care to render the facial expression of the face with a touching intimacy and proximity in the bronze work, whereas the group of figures in concrete, seemingly a family on the move, is conceived and executed with minimum suggestive insinuations allowing the forms and their nearly inseparable shapes to speak for themselves, as a composite faceless mass, without conferring any individuality to the figures, so to speak. Akin to this, most of his works tend to be reductive in terms of underplaying the details and emphasizing the play of shapes, either resorting to geometrical planes intersecting with each other or agile rhythmic features characterizing the works, as clearly perceptible in the works like – two animals in a hug, and the bird – respectively executed in wood and terracotta. Interestingly, both these works and also one may include the concrete hen with extended neck, reveal De’s firm and confident command on the visual language of structural geometry bordering on a reluctant abstraction, which refuses to sacrifice the organic and natural state of being entirely. The animals and birds evoke their natural existence with as much clarity as they embrace the language of abstraction. The successful possibility of this curious blend, one of the hallmarks of Indian modernity in visual art, seems to have impressed Suren De profoundly, while his mentor Ramkinkar’s fondness for structural precision has remained a foundational stone in all his works. However, certain works like the terracotta one from the early 1980s that suggests an affinity with the shape of a reclining figure, relies on lessening the recognizable elements to an extent that the work declines to be identified in terms of any subject and prefers to be understood and appreciated as a non-figurative, nearly abstract sculpture whose strength lies in not what it stands for but how it exists as a three-dimensional sculptural entity. Despite the fact that the work certainly holds a possibility to be read with a certain recognition and thus identified figuratively, the direction is unquestionably towards a non-objective visualization eliminating any literal interpretation right at the outset. The reductive language gets a sharper and more confident statement in another concrete work from around the same time, where the references to real life get completely eradicated and comes close to the rudiment of construction and visual relations between different parts and segments of the same sculpture. Undoubtedly, De comes back to the fundamental lessons of sculpture making again and again in his works.
The kernel of Suren De’s oeuvre, as evident in this body of works, lies in his relentless negotiation between a reductive language and a relatively descriptive rendering of forms. In these two works in wood from the 1950s, one can clearly trace the way his mind is working while trying to deal with the same subject, the figure of a standing woman in this case, in two completely diverse visual idioms. Both seem to be referring to traditional art forms where the representations of the female figures assume an iconic stature and value. Suren De, while retaining the iconic posture in both, creates two remarkably contrasting sculptural statements. The first one displays figurative and ornamental details within a shallow depth recalling the Bharhut relief sculptures, and the second one eschews all the details, reducing the figure to its fundamental structural value and making the face completely devoid of any features, leaving it as an oval shape somewhat reminiscent of Constantin Brancussi’s egg-shaped heads. The versatility and virtuosity of the sculptor were making their presence felt gradually and decisively, augmented by the sculptor’s exposure to both the traditional Indian art and Western modern.
The present exhibition, Figures of Resilience, brings back into public view a little-known but captivating body of work that Suren De left behind, seen collectively for the first time in decades. His surviving sculptures mark a compelling, underexamined chapter in post-independence Indian neo-figuration and deserve, at last, a noteworthy place in art-historical discourse. In his hands, the legacy of Ramkinkar lives on not as nostalgia, but as a living, resilient form. His response to the formalist call of modernism, paired with an impulse to arrive at a seamless amalgam with the subject, without relinquishing its distinct organic nature and the emotional quotient, suggests an unforeseen journey that was never fully realized. This distinctive resilience, tangible in these sculptures in various ways, may well have been the groundwork for a more resolute body of work that time did not allow him to make. What remains is the trajectory or the trace itself; a roadmap of promise, cut short in 1982 when the artist died at fifty-two, yet still gripping in its ambition and integrity.
