Anjolie Ela Menon’s biography released as she turns 70

NEW DELHI - A day before her 70th birthday, a pictorial biography of leading Indian contemporary artist Anjolie Ela Menon covering 55 years of her career was released by filmmaker Shyam Benegal Friday in the presence of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s wife Gursharan Kaur.

The launch here was accompanied by the inauguration of a month-long retrospective exhibition of Menon’s art featuring 70 large-format oil paintings from her entire oeuvre of works, documenting her aesthetic evolution.

The illustrated book, “Anjolie Ela Menon: Through the Patina”, has been published by the Vadehra Art Gallery and authored by art critic and writer “Isana Murty”, well-known defence analyst C. Uday Bhaskar, who writes under a pen name.

At a time, when modernist abstraction is preferred by artists both in India and the West, Anjolie Ela Menon’s works have been rigorously figurative, sensuous, romantic and individualistic, the book said.

Releasing the book, filmmaker Shyam Benegal said, he had first seen Anjolie Ela Menon’s work “50 years ago in an exhibition on Gordon Road in Mumbai”. They struck him. “She later gifted a painting of Christ’s head to me,” Benegal said.

Gursharan Kaur, who is an art connoisseur, said she was “very fond of Anjolie Ela Menon’s works”.

“I like everything about her art. I can’t single out any particular aspect,” she told IANS, when asked what was it about Menon’s works that moved her.

Menon was born in West Bengal to Amar Dev, a descendant of Raja Nabakrishna Dev of the Sova Bazar royalty, July 17, 1940.