An Insider's View: Richard Bartholomew's writings on Indian art

Richard Bartholomew, as a compilation of his writings reveals, was an art critic who didn’t let his friendships with the top artists of his time suppress his voice

(Written for Open magazine)

A Burmese émigré who had arrived in India in 1942, Richard Bartholomew entered the literary-cultural scene when studying English literature at St Stephen’s College, and then as a teacher of English at Delhi’s Modern School from 1951 to 1958. A poet and a photographer himself, he started writing and publishing as an art critic in 1955. From the late 1950s until his tragic and sudden death from a stroke in 1985, Bartholomew’s was the most important critical voice on the Delhi art scene, and he among the most important art critics in India. From 1977 till 1985, he took on, in addition, the onerous task of institution building as secretary of the Lalit Kala Akademi.

And yet, until 2009, when his son Pablo Bartholomew, himself a photographer, put his photographs together in a show and a book called The Critic’s Eye, Richard Bartholomew’s was not a name I knew. The Art Critic, self-published by Pablo after a difficult, muddled, often painful process that ended up taking 27 years (and which he gives partial voice to in a remarkably honest afterword), finally brings to a contemporary readership a definitive collection of Richard Bartholomew’s critical writings. Voluminous at roughly 200,000 words (edited down from the original 300,000), this is an ‘art book’ like no other.

Opinionated, often provocative, but always thoughtful, Bartholomew’s writing has the rare virtue of combining the survey and the longue durée with a marvellous immediacy, giving the present-day reader a privileged sense of modern Indian art ‘as it happened’.

The liveliness of his prose is also based on his ability to straddle worlds: while treating art with all the seriousness of a national mission, he constantly strives to translate what is essentially high culture into something that ordinary people—middle and upper middle-class readers of The Indian Express or The Times of India or Thought magazine—ought to be able to connect with, enjoy, and even if possible own. Sample: ‘The best thing about… ‘Graphic Workshop 1974’, organized in Baroda, is that each print has been brought out in a small edition of 50… [enabling work to be priced] at Rs 50 which is the price of a whiskey bottle or a cotton sari.’

It is a sensibility that can only have come from a critic who was on familiar, if not intimate, terms with many players in the art world—and yet wrote about it not for the coffee-table book or the rarefied academic volume but for the educated layperson. And also, perhaps, only from an art world still un-feted (and un-buffeted) by the market; Richard’s writing, writes Geeta Kapur, ‘matured on a typewriter in modest dwellings that neighboured the artists’ equally modest studio-apartments’.

Bartholomew himself saw his role with fierce clarity. ‘The critic who wishes to be articulate must be prepared to discuss reviews with artists; he must be at home in the artist’s studio and he must be an integral part of the art movement. If there is no art movement, he must try to foster one,’ he wrote in Cultural Forum in 1959. ‘It is imperative that he should have the respect of three institutions: (1) the public; (2) the artist; (3) the editor. This triple test disqualifies many for the vocation of criticism, for criticism is a supreme test of integrity.’

The book provides ample evidence that Richard held himself to these standards. He was close to several of the painters he wrote about—Ram Kumar, whom Richard and his wife Rati (then Batra) befriended at St Stephen’s College; Kanwal Krishna, having taught alongside him at Modern School (where Geeta Kapur first encountered the two of them as teachers and whose art room Krishna ‘treated for all the world like an artist’s atelier and evening hub’), and his wife, the artist and printmaker Devyani Krishna; A Ramachandran, who remembers Richard and Rati arriving at his barsati door to invite him and wife for dinner at their place, also in Jangpura; MF Husain; and Satish Gujral. And yet these are artists whose work received Richard’s most scrupulous honesty. Sample three statements on Husain’s paintings: in 1961 Richard can write, ‘As my acquaintance with Husain grows I begin to marvel at his virtuosity. Husain is a careless painter often; he is a facile painter sometimes; but Husain is a painter with a carefully selected repertoire, always.’ In 1965, he can write, ‘The 23 Husain drawings in this exhibition are good drawing-room pieces.’ And in a long essay on Husain published in a 1972 volume, he can make the following marvellous observation: ‘Men put so much energy into words, even if they do not believe all that is said. Husain puts that energy into paint.’

The integrity that Bartholomew brought to his work drew reactions in kind from the artists themselves. Here is Richard writing about Satish Gujral: ‘And when I criticised him for the want of finesse and conviction in the lettering and the slogans of his terracotta pieces of 1969-70, he had the heart and the good sense to take it in his stride, though it hurt. “A man doesn’t do what he has succeeded in doing all the time,” [he said].’

He draws analogies and references from far afield, from literature and poetry most of all, but also in vivid prose, from the natural and cultural environment of his adoptive country. Here he is on Raza’s Indian palette: ‘His colours are those of the Banaras brocade, the Gujarati manuscript, the blazing intensity of the Indian summer with its glory of the gulmohur and the laburnum.’ Reading Richard’s writing, in fact, one has not the slightest sense of the outsider’s trepidation, or desire not to offend.

On the contrary, one is pleasantly surprised by the forthright way in which he broaches, for instance, such presumably sensitive subjects as Bengali dominance. In a 1959 piece called ‘Art in the Shadow of Official Patronage’, he took the Lalit Kala Akademi to task for several things, including its institution of a tripartite division of art submissions for a prize into ‘oriental, academic-realistic, and modern’. ‘Manifestly this is a move to provide sanction to the decadent and dying Bengal School, for which Mr Barada Ukil, the Secretary, and Mr DP Roy Chowdhury, the Chairman, must necessarily have much sentimental attachment… it is pertinent to point out that three centres of art instruction in this country are being managed by Bengali artists, by Mr BC Sanyal in Delhi, Mr Bishwanath Mukerji in Hyderabad, and by Mr Chintamani Kar in Calcutta. The Curator of the National Gallery of Modern Art, Mr Pradosh Das Gupta, is also a Bengali. For better or for worse, there is the influence of Bengalis at the top official places in Indian art today. The general ambivalence, therefore, is understandable.’

And yet, there is no slanderous gossip here, no personal slurs. What there is is a deep-rooted, not always rational, distaste for the ‘nostalgia’ and ‘romanticism’ of the Bengal School. But even this avowed critical disdain for nostalgia and romanticism is never allowed to swamp his instinctively positive response to a body of work. About Amrita Sher-Gil, for example, he writes with empathy rather than dismissal: ‘The pensively stanced figures of the countryside in a Sher-Gil painting breathe a romanticism that is born of the regret that these things were passing away.’

It is impossible to do justice to this vast volume in a short review. But suffice it to say that Bartholomew is attentive to the smallest detail in a work of art, writing passionately about colour and light and form, the stroke that creates the hunch of a back—while never shying away from the big picture questions that you almost rarely hear asked anymore: Is modern Indian art merely imitative of Western art? What does its Indianness consist of? What is the role of State patronage? You may or may not agree with his answers, but it is more than sufficient pleasure to discover so fine an interlocutor—and one you did not know existed.

Published in Open magazine, 20 Oct 2012.

Column - Time of the signs

Moonlit night, Old Delhi, c. 1956. Photographer: Richard Bartholomew

Between the lines

In Jhandewalan, named for the mandir with the fluttering flags, though perhaps better known for housing the headquarters of the RSS – and Aaj Tak – you can now view art. No, I’m not talking about the giant Hanuman statue at that gol chakkar. There is now a gallery in Jhandewalan. It holds exhibitions. The things contained within its walls have been certified as art.

I muttered something about Videocon Tower, refusing, as one sometimes does, to tell the autowala where exactly I wanted to go. There seemed something surreal about looking for an art gallery in Jhandewalan, even – or especially – with the aid of directions like “turn left after the cycle market” and “you’ll pass the old Naaz Cinema on your left”. It was even stranger, having traversed this dusty, post-industrial landscape, to find oneself entering a gleaming Hyundai showroom, all squares of steel and glass – and then to find inside the pristine white walls and solitary bench that one has come to expect of galleries, as well as that air of secular worshipfulness meant to keep non-believers out.

But the real surprise was what was on those walls: a series of photographs in black and white, many of them images of the city one had just left behind, beyond the glass doors. Images from half a century ago – from Connaught Place, Kashmere Gate, Asaf Ali Road.

The man behind the camera was called Richard Bartholomew, an art critic, poet and painter who fled his native Burma during the Japanese occupation of 1942 and made Delhi his home for the next 40-odd years. You look at these images of the city he made his own, and you wonder whether it is the outsider’s eye that makes the city come alive as it does here; makes it seem sometimes ethereal, sometimes ghostly. Just when you’re about to walk on to the next photograph, you notice something odd about the image in front of you – a shadow on the wall, two minuscule phantom figures in the stormy distance. In “Narinder Place on Parliament Street”, it seems a normal traffic-filled day, until you see the man lifting up his pajamas to wade carefully through the water towards the approaching bus. What you think of as a standard street scene in Delhi, then and now – construction workers lifting their loads in a haze of dust while a man cycles past – is transformed when you notice the figure outlined on the edge of the roof above, poised, stable, and yet on the brink. These are images with story: the possibility of story that emerges from the city, but will only so emerge when you step out of the flow of everything and look, carefully.

All taken up with looking and listening for stories, I leave the gallery without my phone – listening to the man walking by singing “O mere dil ke chain”. I walk to the Metro station, a long leisurely walk: looking. Then scrabble around in my bag; break into a run, suddenly panic-stricken; find the one remaining PCO and call my own number. It’s only when I’ve ensured my phone is safe that I hear the man behind me say, “Jaldi de de bhai, Dilli mein kisi ko time nahi hai aajkal.”

This column was published in Time Out Delhi, Vol 2 Issue 24, Feb 20 - Mar 6, 2009

A Little Bit Of Magic - Photography Review

Richard Bartholomew’s poetic sensibilities animate his stunning photographic collection.

ONE COMES away from the exhibition of Richard Bartholomew’s photographs at Photoink Gallery, New Delhi, wondering whether it should really have been entitled ‘The Critic’s Eye’. It’s true that Bartholomew was best known as an art critic. But he was also a curator (running the first museum of Tibetan art in Delhi and serving as Secretary of the Lalit Kala Akademi), a poet and a painter. And it’s his poetic and painterly sensibilities, and his documentary skills, that really animate this stunning photographic collection.

The most accessible images are his portraits of some of India’s famous artists, or of his family. One recurring composition is the artist with his painting: a pose in which we get an intense Ram Kumar, a gesticulating FN Souza, a quiet Biren De, and then Bartholomew himself. More unusual are the photographs of painters socialising: groups of serious-faced men in dark suits, thick-rimmed spectacles and precisely-held cigarettes, which would not have seemed out of place in a Calcutta boxwallah’s office. Then there are a remarkable set of images of his wife Rati and his sons Pablo and Robin: bathing, drying clothes, sitting around, but most often sleeping or reading. This is a domesticity in which books and cameras are ubiquitous, even if people sleep on the floor. It’s also, of course, an extremely unusual portrait of motherhood: Rati always has a book and a cigarette, even as she lies comfortingly close to her sleeping child. There is an intimacy to these images that is both startling and warming.


The same affectionate yet perspicacious eye captures Delhi, the city in which he spent 42 of his 59 years, after fleeing Burma during the 1942 Japanese occupation. But even as he records the city’s life as everyday experience, his gaze remains oblique, picking out the detail at the edge of the frame that both counters and sets off the central image. In one photograph, a man stands poised on the edge of a flat-roofed governmental building while construction workers below lift malba, and a man cycles slowly to work. In another, an umbrella-holding man picks up his pyjamas as he wades carefully through a crowded street.

Some of the most striking images are from Bartholomew’s travels in the US in the 1970s. The human body, here, is framed against the landscape of consumer capitalism — not held by the environment, but divorced from it. But here, too, some of the most haunting images are ones that seem least dramatic at first glance. The girl at the Metropolitan Museum is a study in serenity — until you find that the culture-gazer is herself being looked at, by a baby in a pram. The woman with a suitcase, striding purposefully away, turns out to be barefoot.

The best thing about the exhibitionary form is that choices and placement conduct a magic dance of their own. When a plane flying over Delhi’s fields reappears over an American cemetery, one image becomes bound to the other. It is such unexpected secret connections that make Bartholomew’s oeuvre a little bit magic.

A Critic’s Eye is on at Photoink Gallery, New Delhi, until February 28

From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 6, Issue 7, Dated Feb 21, 2009