Click to play videoAnjolie Ela Menon is one of India’s most respected artists. Her icon-like paintings have a wide following and her prolific art spans frescoes, glass, trunks, window frames and chairs.
The artist started life as Anjolie Ela Dey. She lost her mother early and was brought up in a privileged Bramho-Brahmin family. Anjolie’s father expected her to follow in his footsteps and become a doctor but the muse found her early.
She married her schoolmate Raja Menon, a Naval officer, after she returned from her art school in Paris. Proud of her roles as housewife, mother and grandmother, Anjolie speaks to CNN-IBN’s Anuradha SenGupta about her art and the responsibility of an artist.
Anuradha SenGupta: Exactly eight years ago, when you turned 60, you said, “I have but a decade or so left to work.” Is that because you were not sure about the ageing process and therefore what you could do or is it that you consciously decided that around 70 you want to retire?
Anjolie Ela Menon: I was trying to be realistic. A lot of people think that painting is rather a sissy-ish sort of a pastime, which requires you to sit and play with paint but you have to be very vigorous, especially if you are doing large works. You’ve got to be able to get on scaffoldings. My feet started getting wobbly about 30 years ago. I realised that the body will age even if the mind is charging ahead. Having said that, I hope I have 10 more years now.
Anuradha SenGupta: There is a sense that great hurt, loss, suffering or even physical struggle create great works of art, no matter what the medium is. So clearly this is a romanticised notion then?
Anjolie Ela Menon: It is partly a romanticized notion but if you have profundity or depth in what you’re doing, I think you have to go to sources that are just not superficial. I’ve always joked to say that I’m Bengali and Bengalis tend to be melancholic. If you look at Rabindra Sangeet, it is quite melancholic though celebratory in many ways. A lot of people talk about painters’ struggle. And I’ve been through that. The years in France were very difficult. We were on a very short scholarship, which barely covered our necessaries, and then I was married to a Naval officer. We started out with €400 a month.
Anuradha SenGupta: You returned to India and you went to Lovedale, your old school, to teach and that’s when you got engaged and married to your husband?
Anjolie Ela Menon: Yes, we were very young when we married.
Anuradha SenGupta: In all your journeys and all your time away, you knew that he was the guy for you?
Anjolie Ela Menon: Absolutely. I was much pursued in Paris as most girls were. We were with a gang of Italian and African boys there. We used to spend time together and one day a young African boy got very angry with all of us. He said, “What you Indian girls do for fun? You no smoke, you no drink, you no sleep?” So we managed to have a very innocent fun at that, considering that all around us there was bohemia raging.
Anuradha SenGupta: So you’ve been pretty unconventional as an artist and conventional as a non-artist.
Anjolie Ela Menon: Yes and I wonder why you want to interview me because my daily life is pretty boring. I’m absolutely immersed in my family, children and grand children.
Anuradha SenGupta: I’m quoting you: “In this pandemonium , I live alone finding a secret space from which to touch the sources of creativity. I inhabit a place, which I can share with no one for any length of time. I don’t think this conversation is quite the moment to bare my soul. Its hard enough to put it on canvas.” When is the right time to bare your soul?
Anjolie Ela Menon: Perhaps, never. I’m very lucky that I have friends whom I’ve had for 60 years and maybe I bare my soul to them. But the other day someone rang me up and asked me about my spirituality. I think sex and spirituality are most private to a person and never to be discussed.
Anuradha SenGupta: When you paint, every canvas that has gone out, how much of yourself and your soul really gets in there?
Anjolie Ela Menon: I think a lot of your soul goes out in the best of your paintings. If you have to churn out painting for reasons, some of them tend to get superficial or repetitive.
Anjolie Ela Menon: When I started painting there was no market. So it wasn’t like you were painting for somebody else. You were painting for yourself and that awful cliché ‘art for art’s sake’ was absolutely true. It’s no longer like that. It’s for money’s sake for a lot of young new painters.
Anuradha SenGupta: What’s wrong with that because at the end of the day it’s a livelihood?
Anjolie Ela Menon: Nothing’s wrong with that. It’s just that a lot of people from my generation haven’t been able to accept it. The youngsters say declare it unabashedly that if they have the opportunity to make money, they’ll churn the paintings out, even 20 a week if need be.
Anuradha SenGupta: You’ve never done that?
Anjolie Ela Menon: Of course not. We weren’t brought up with that kind of a belief.
Anjolie is scared that more needs to be done and more people need to be educated about art, history and appreciation. If that doesn’t happen, art will remain a rarefied interest. Always willing to try out new things, Anjolie recently co-exhibited with her granddaughter Madhavi and her grandson, who’s an architect. She’s happy that her grandchildren are painting but doesn’t nurse any burning ambition for them to follow in her footsteps.
Anjolie Ela Menon: They go for tennis, they go for kathak and they love to paint Whole day long they’re painting.
Anuradha SenGupta: So it’s not as if you’re hoping that your grandchildren will continue the tradition that you started?
Anjolie Ela Menon: No. I’m worried Madhavi will start faking me when I get too old to paint (laughs).
Anuradha SenGupta: I don’t think you should put ideas in her head.
Anjolie Ela Menon: Anjolie, a trained artist, quit Mumbai’s’ JJ School of Art within six months of joining it. She moved to Paris and learnt how to make frescoes. She spent a huge amount of time watching cinema, but it’s the time she spent travelling around countries like Italy, Greece and France that she says really helped her set her eye in a particular way.
Anjolie Ela Menon: I was on a Romanesque kick at that point, so I think I visited every Roman cathedral and church. My classmate and I used to lie on the floor to look at the ceilings because our necks used to hurt from looking up all the time. So quite often we used to find ourselves at some abandoned church lying on the floor and taking notes. So that was a major influence.
Anuradha SenGupta: For a lot of people, appreciating art has become less of an emotional or an instinctive thing and more of an intellectual thing. It’s almost as if the art is only for the discerning. Is that true?
Anjolie Ela Menon: That question has been put to me more in terms of commerce of it: why isn’t the public able to buy paintings? Why are the prices so high? Throughout history the public was never able to buy paintings and public was never the patron of art. It was always the church, the state or the monarchs.
Anuradha SenGupta: So are you saying then that art is elitist and will continue to stay elitist?
Anjolie Ela Menon: It will continue to remain that way but thanks to Johannes Gutenberg and others who followed him, we have prints so everyone can get an image. And the quality is increasingly getting better.
Anuradha SenGupta: How really do you decide the cost of a painting?
Anjolie Ela Menon: I don’t ever decide. I leave it to the gallery or the dealer. Auctions, too, have played a very big part. They have made certain benchmarks. Unfortunately, it has translated itself into “by-the-inch,” which is horrid.
Anuradha SenGupta: Unlike in France, I believe when your painting is auctioned you don’t get any benefit of those huge crores that people talk about?
Anjolie Ela Menon: No, nothing at all. In fact, when Tayab’s (Tayab Mehta) painting fetched crores, the painting belonged to the Times of India. They didn’t so much as give Tayab a champagne party. Tayab got nothing out of it and I thought that was so awful. But we are trying to move the government to make this law for India as well but as with all laws the implementation maybe difficult.
Anuradha SenGupta: What is it with artists and self-portraits?
Anjolie Ela Menon: You go through a phase of narcissism when you’re young and you’re also the model that’s readily available
Anuradha SenGupta: You’ve been criticised four the nudes you have done.
Anjolie Ela Menon: I was not really criticised, but a lot of people have said that the nude was too idealised, too beautiful but I deliberately tried to defy that perfection.
Anuradha SenGupta: Over the years, do you think you have perfected your form?
Anjolie Ela Menon: Yes, perhaps. You acquire that facility to paint and, therefore, in other words you acquire the facility to paint better, but better does not necessarily mean stronger. You tend to become over refined.
Anuradha SenGupta: You’ve said that you haven’t really been able to identify with the typical Indian woman because your upbringing was different , privileged and educated. Yet as a female artist, has it been difficult?
Anjolie Ela Menon: I’ve always said that the thing I’ve really lacked as a female painter because I have a husband but I don’t have a wife . There are a lot of well-known painters that I know who have these pandering wives who are always bringing little cups of tea, promoting their husband’s art in the market, etc.
Anuradha SenGupta: And a supporting husband can’t equal to what an adoring wife can bring to the table.
Anjolie Ela Menon: Not at all. A supporting husband needs support.
Anuradha SenGupta: You’ve spoken about the kind of persecution that Husain has seen by both Muslims and Hindus. Where do you think an artist needs to draw the line between creative expression and someone else’s sensitivity?
Anjolie Ela Menon: All his paintings were painted 30 years ago and I’m absolutely certain that he meant no harm to anyone’s sentiments. I was at this TV show, which had a large audience, and I asked them, which of these paintings has really offended you? Not one hand went up. So people are not offended by the paintings, they are offended by the propaganda that has been launched against the paintings. Why should nudity offend us? All our icons of the past were nude. All of our icons go back to the time when there was no clothing. They only dressed in beads and jewellery.
Anuradha SenGupta: So the point is that there is no drawing the line as far as an artist is concerned?
Anjolie Ela Menon: I think artists have to censor themselves just like cinema, songs or music or poetry. So there is a self-imposed line. If you think that the line is not significant then there is no line.
Anuradha SenGupta: Where does Anjolie Ela Menon the artists go next?
Anjolie Ela Menon: One never knows and that’s a part of the surprise that one keeps for one’s own self.
Anuradha SenGupta: So you begin with a blank canvas…
Anjolie Ela Menon: It’s more than that. I do things keeping in mind that the whole exhibition has to be homogenous and I’m not sure where the next exhibition will be. It’s a body of work.
Anuradha SenGupta: We really look forward to. We wish you all the best and thank you so much for this wonderful time.
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