L. Munuswamy, born in 1927 in Madras and a renowned painter and teacher, has played a significant role in the search of a vocabulary of artistic expression in South India. The decade of 1960’s saw a sustained art movement in the region led by D.P. Roychowdhury, K.C.S. Paniker and S. Dhanapal, all of whom helped to shape his vision as an artist. Western techniques and subjects formed an important source of inspiration and cinema with all its political undertones in promoting the movement created its own sense of vitality. He was a touchstone for the different ideas and trends flowing through the Madras art scene in the 50’s and 60’s. There was an attempt to create an idiom keeping the traditional forms of artistic expression alive while embracing these new forms of visual representation.  

The art and world of Munuswamy flouts the fixities of set conventions, of a definite image and a perspectival grid that freezes the palpable realty of the surrounding physical world. His fluid lines and floating spaces transcend the limitations of an imitative realism to explore the fresh possibilities and challenges that come with the desire for change.  

His most daunting task over the years was to respond to the overbearing influence of his teachers and yet push it out of his way to fill in with his own. Against the British academic realism and the Bengal School romanticism, his melting colours and languorous lines playfully meandered to transpose reality, drawing contours on the layered colours to delineate forms. He often asserted his individuality through a deliberate deviance, turning iconoclastic through erasures that effaced the drawn portrait or figure. Munuswamy in an experimental mood, drifted to different genres and style- if rapid stroky lines take directions to suggest a seated figure, the flat mosaic like brushstrokes bury the human couple within the complex arrangement of limbs. If on the one hand, he painted with an affective charge, his female figures in heavy impasto, on the other, he also abstracted his compositions to evoke a lyrical visual symphony, detached from the objective reality around. 

Almost as a reaction it might seem, Munuswamy’s work explodes with an energy that is all but inexplicable. There are works where his lines just fling themselves up and out of his canvas with an almost tangible frenzy, suggesting the pent up fury of nature. There have been paintings earlier of a turbulent sea tossing a boat about but these images of limbs and torsos scattered about like dead leaves recall both the style of the monumental paintings and the obliteration of line and form. As Munuswamy told Anjali Sircar during their conversation: “I have perhaps arrived at a style where I am unable to go through the same intense feelings for the human form, particularly the form of woman, without going in for the usual, recognizable feelings. The paintings shattered and random suggestions of the same forms in broken and faded out lines or structures could represent anything from a female form to an abstract landscape or the rhythm of waves or the flight of a bird or the swaying of a blade of grass.” This was the period of paintings criss-crossed with black lines, of bodies flung across the canvas, either decapitated or with dismembered limbs, of couples embracing in a manner which suggested a corpse being lowered into the earth. 

Delhi Art Gallery, in continuation with its aim to showcase significant artists struggling in the early modern period in India, will be presenting L. Munuswamy and his works after a hiatus of several years. The creative artist and social recluse continues to live and work in Chennai.