Krishen Khanna

Biography

In 1946 Krishen Khanna was earning 350 rupees a month at Kapoor Art Works, a printing and art firm in Lahore, and with his first salary he bought a painting by Prannath Mago. That, by his own account, was how his life as an artist began.

He was born on 5 July 1925 in Lyallpur (now Faisalabad, Pakistan). When he was two, the family moved to Lahore. His father, Kahan Chand Khanna, taught at a college; in 1930 he went to England to take a doctorate and brought back reproductions of Leonardo da Vinci’s self-portrait and “The Last Supper”. The boy remembered them for a long time. In 1936 the family moved to Multan.

In 1938, at thirteen, Khanna won the Rudyard Kipling Scholarship and sailed from Bombay to England on the RMS Strathmore. At the Imperial Service College he first studied art in earnest. In 1942 he passed the Oxford and Cambridge School Certificate examinations, with art among his subjects. From 1944 he lived in Lahore again and graduated from Government College, where he read English literature. In 1946 he began studying drawing in Sheikh Ahmed’s studio, worked at Kapoor Art Works, where he learned painting and printing, and showed his picture “Dead Tree” at the annual exhibition of the Punjab Art Society. It was well received.

Then came hard years. Because of communal riots, it was no longer possible to stay in Lahore. On 12 August 1947 the family of five left by car, abandoning their home, and settled in Shimla.

From 1948 Khanna worked as an officer at Grindlays Bank in Bombay. The job supported his family, but left little time for painting. In Bombay he became friends with the painter Palsikar, and at an exhibition at the Bombay Art Gallery he met Francis Newton Souza, and then the other members of the Progressive Artists’ Group: Maqbool Fida Husain, Hari Ambadas Gade, Syed Haider Raza, Krishnaji Howlaji Ara and Sadanand Bakre. He became part of that circle. His painting “News of Gandhi’s Death” was shown at the golden jubilee exhibition of the Bombay Art Society: Hindus and Muslims stand around a traffic island in Delhi, reading a newspaper report of the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. The critic Rudolf von Leyden wrote at length about the work and predicted that Khanna would be among the best artists in the country. His first painting, “Spring Nude”, was bought in the late 1940s for 225 rupees by Homi Bhabha for the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research; Husain, with whom Khanna had left the picture, sold it before Khanna departed from Bombay.

In 1953 the bank transferred Khanna to Madras. There he made the “Musician” series, inspired by Carnatic music and Bharatanatyam, and in 1955 held his first solo show. His early pictures showed life in southern India, fishermen with brown skin glowing in the sun, and the moods of the sea. In 1957 he took part in the Tokyo Biennial, in 1960 he exhibited in England for the first time (Leicester Galleries, London), and in 1961 he left the bank and worked as an artist full time. That same year he showed work at the São Paulo Biennial, and in 1962 at the Venice Biennale.

In 1962 he received a Rockefeller Fellowship, in 1963–64 he was artist-in-residence at the American University in Washington, and then he lived in New York. There he experimented with pure abstraction; a trip to Japan gave him an interest in Japanese ink painting, which is visible in “Vijay” (“Victory”, 1965). A visit to the battlefields of the Indo-Pakistani war of 1965 changed his painting: people appeared on his canvases again, and violence became the theme. For some time he lectured on art at Jawaharlal Nehru University, and in 1968 he was appointed honorary director of the Triennial cell at the Lalit Kala Akademi.

From the late 1960s Khanna turned to city life: vegetable and fruit sellers on the pavements, storytellers ringed by street children, people in neighbourhood cafés and dhabas, bandwallahs in crimson uniforms with shining braid, festivals and processions. In 1974 he painted the Truck series. He saw the truck as a sign of a world moving towards catastrophe under the pressure of technology. Later came a cycle based on the New Testament: Khanna painted Christ above all as an ordinary human being and deliberately moved away from the post-Renaissance European manner, which tended to mask the agony and passion of the subject. Thirteen works from the cycle were shown in Delhi in 1980. His best-known pictures also include “The Last Supper” (1979) and “La Pietà” (1988).

For the lobby of the ITC Maurya hotel in New Delhi he spent more than two years painting “The Great Procession” on a ceiling of about three thousand square feet, on the theme of a pilgrimage. He also illustrated his father’s book “As They Saw India” (1971). About 120 of his works were shown at a retrospective in New Delhi in January 2010. His paintings are held in the National Gallery of Modern Art, the Museum of Modern Art and other collections.

In 1990 Khanna received the Padma Shri, in 2004 the Lalit Kala Ratna, and in 2011 the Padma Bhushan. For many years he campaigned for peace and goodwill between India and Pakistan; in 1988 he went back to Lahore for the first International Biennale of Art. To my mind, this episode explains as much about his biography as the exhibitions do.