Bikash Bhattacharjee

Bikash Bhattacharjee (1940-2006) was born in Calcutta. He graduated from the Indian College of Arts and Draftsmanship, Calcutta in 1963. Thereafter, he began teaching at his alma mater in 1968.  In 1973, he began teaching at the Government College of Art & Craft and taught there until 1982. He was also a member of the Society of Contemporary Artists.

Bhattacharjee was a prolific realistic painter. His works were inspired by his early childhood, the rooftops and alleyways of north Calcutta where he lived, the crumbling walls of buildings, and the people from his environment. His subjects were portraits of people from a politically charged atmosphere of Calcutta. His characters were representative of their class and included depictions of the female form, and people of all ages and situations – old men and women, children, and domestic help. He had the ability to create an authentic milieu as a background to the characters, heightening the drama. Realism was Bhattacharjee’s forte, and he explored the possibilities of oil as a medium to the extent that he could depict the exact quality of drapery or skin tone of a woman, capturing the light perfectly.

He made art that was an instrument of aesthetic and social critique; in his prime, his paintings were a window into the struggles of poverty and socio-economic unrest that surrounded him. From the late 1960s to the early 1970s, Bhattacharjee created a series of surreal paintings, with the subtext of demonic or subhuman characters in a setting of either dark fantasy or comic drama.

Bhattacharjee collaborated with writer Samwesh Bose and illustrated a fictionalized biography of artist Ramkinkar Baij. The project remained incomplete due to Bose’s sudden death.

He received numerous awards including those from the Academy of Fine Art, Calcutta (1962); the Birla Academy of Art and Culture, Calcutta (1971), and the Lalit Kala Akademi National Award, New Delhi (1971, 1972). In 1987, he was awarded the Bangla Ratna from the state government and the Padma Shri by the Indian government in 1988.

Bhattacharjee died in 2006.