Nomadic artist made mythos his subject

Polish painter dabbled in various forms of arts

Maharajas wanting to be immortalised on canvases rushed to Norblin

A pearl ensconced in an oyster shell irrespective of a connoisseur glimmers and glitters in the deep murky ocean bed. And Stefan Norblin who had made the Indian sub-continent and its histories his subject is a case in point. The versatile artist from Poland in 1940s waded through the Indian sub-continent psyche and the myriad literary mythological works, depicting a Eurasian perspective on the canvas and murals through European eyes.

Under an Indo-Polish cultural exchange programme, works of this little known but highly-prodigious artist is being restored with several of them being put up on exhibition at National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA,) in Mumbai till January 8.

Norblin was probably the first European artist who probed and tried to interpret Indian mythologies through a  political prism, unlike Nikolai Roerich, the Russian mystical painter who sought truth beyond the phenomenal appearances of mountains, glades and rivers, or Indian artist Raja Ravi Varma, whose lust for life found expression in calendar art depicting aesthetic boundaries of mythological female figures.

The sheer breadth of the vision of this self-taught artist, who dabbled in various art forms, bedazzles the eyes and the mind alike. The political interpretation finding its expression in murals and on canvases may have been possibly due to the flux in the socio-political scenario in British India.

It may also be having roots in the emergence of an intellectual strand of Indological school which instead of just focussing on the epistemological or ontological studies in Indian texts, emphasised on the dialectical interplay of political forces hidden betwixt the mythological dramas.

“He came to India in early 1940s. Till then and ironically even after he left… India has seen scores of foreign artists making this sub-continent their home, drawing inspiration from a variety of sources and combing their sensibilities with elements of Indian art. But then it was only he (Norblin) who managed to spontaneously fuse his European weltanschauung with the Indian mythos,” says NGMA Director Rajeev Lochan.

“His very selection by us was because of this. He was always an enigma even to the people who assigned him work. Since, he was primarily a portraitist, Maharajas wanting to be immortalised on canvases rushed to him. It was also a trend at the time. But soon he was into painting murals… and that is when he began delving into studying the multiple world-views permeating the Indian psyche,” Prof Lochan points out. “And he began fusing his own psycho-social conditioning formed and derived from his travels through the three distinct continents into Indian mythologies.” 

Norblin, born in 1892 in Poland throughout his life till he finally settled down in the US, where he passed away within six years, remained rooted to his gypsy soul. And this wanderlust that kept him on the move, opened new horizons of interpretations.

After trundling through Poland, etching out portraits, Norblin like many artists, writers and intellectuals, left Polish soil following the advent of World War II in 1939. In Poland, after toying with portraits, he ventured into dress-designing and for eking out a  living started sketching out advertisement hoardings without finding it a demeaning work of art.

His official biography, quoting from one of his letter, states: “I am interested not only in the portrait but also in disciplines where decorative values play a role. I dream of murals, grand frescoes. I am inclined towards historical-fantastical illustrations in which I can play out my day-dreams.”

His journey towards Iraq and then to India nurtured his dreams to glean out his day-dreams in the historical-fantastical illustrations. In India, his works which have been restored to quite an extent revolve around scenes from the Mahabharata, the Ramayana and other dramas.

In a strange spin of irony, Norblin in all his murals made for palaces in Rajasthan and Gujarat, the figures inhabiting the painting possess Nubian, Mediterranean and Central Asian physical characteristics; all of them pre-disposed towards aggression and anger towards the cosmos and social reality.

Be it the Shiva-Parvati on a cloud, or heroes from Mahabharata or hunter with hunting leopards or Rama and Ravana chariots battle in the heavens, the figures though fantastical, do not resemble Indian physical characteristics.

The brush strokes in these works take pains to emphasise the Nubian and Mediterranean physiques of male figures expressing impassive anger surrounded by brutal determination of the protean political forces. Strangely, the feminine figures also take their physiques from Nubia and Central Asia. They are enigmatic, lithe, ethereal and surrealistically sensual unlike Raja Ravi Varma’s female icons oozing earthy eroticism in social spaces defined at the time.
His restored work reveals his experience as an Occident though impressed by people in northern Africa, Turkey, Iraq and India, is pained at the shifting socio-political conditions of the time. 

Strangely, despite the inner roiling manifesting itself in his interpretations of historical processes through Indian mythologies from a purely political turbulent dialectics, Norblin did not allow his aesthetics to be trapped in any ideological rigidity.

The work clearly delineates and refracts the amalgamation of three different worlds trying to carve out sub-textual spaces through Indian mythos; sometimes in painful forms but more often in enigmatic imagery flowing freely from his brush.

It was in 1946, just when Norblin who had soaked himself totally into the Indian sub-conscious collective psyche, left for the US. It was juncture when his historical-fantasies were reaching peak and possibly would have made a deeper impact than several artists from the time.

Ironically, the artist who drew inspiration for his figures in his murals from other lands while depicting scenes from Indian mythologies, in the US even as he went around designing stages for theatre, drawing expressionist advertisement designs and sketches, his portraits and paintings became subjectivist and etching out existential joys and pains of Indian villagers in a bleak background, leaving the world of gentry and maharajas far behind.