Artist Spotlight - Benode Behari Mukherjee

Boy with Shell Nose

Alt text (a boy outlined with rope and filled in with a collage of various patterns with colours of bright orange, red and green. The background comprises of the same collage materials, newspaper clippings and spade symbols from a deck of cards.)

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Benode Behari Mukherjee, born on 7 February 1904 in Behala (a suburb of Calcutta), was a painter and muralist of great distinction, a teacher of immense resources and influence, and an insightful thinker and writer on art. Following a childhood illness that left him with impaired vision and kept him away from a formal education, at age thirteen, he joined the school founded by Rabindranath Tagore at Santiniketan. After completing his studies at Kala Bhavan, the art school and nucleus for an art movement, he became a member of the teaching faculty… Later in life his eyesight began to decline rapidly, and after an unsuccessful surgery he lost his vision in 1957. However, this did not deter Mukherjee from his creative urge; he then moved towards paper-cuts, prints and sculpture. It was after losing his eyesight that he returned to Santiniketan to teach art history, and even developed his writing, gaining recognition as a modern writer in Bengali. (source)