CERTIFICATE

This is to certify that the work contained in the critical writing entitled “ARTIST
ANJOLIE ELA MENON ”, submitted by Soumya Ranjan Samal(Roll no.-
03BVA19058) for the award of the degree of Bachelor’s Of Visual arts to the ,B.K.
College of Art and Crafts, Bhubaneswar, is a record of bonafide

research works carried out by him under my direct supervision and guidance.
 I considered that the writing has reached the standards and fulfilling the
requirements of the rules and regulations relating to the nature of the degree.
The contents embodied in the thesis have not been submitted for the award of
any other degree or diploma in this or any other university.

DATE:

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 DECLARATION

I hereby declare that the critical writing entitled ‘ARTISTANJOLIE ELA MENON‘,
submitted for the degree of , bachelor’s of Visual arts , is my original piece of work
. This work is never submitted anywhere for award of degree and fellowship .

I certify that,
a. The work contained in the thesis is original and has been done by myself
under the supervision of my supervisor.
b. The work has not been submitted to any other Institute for any degree or
diploma.

c. Whenever I have used materials (data, theoretical analysis, and text) from
other sources, I have given due credit to them by citing them in the text of the
thesis.

d. I have conformed to the norms and idelines given in the Ethical Code of

Conduct of the Institute.

DATE:

PLACE: SIGNATURE OF THE STUDENT

 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
I thank all who in one way or another contributed in the completion of this critical
writing . First, I give thanks to God for protection and ability to do work.

I am so grateful to the B.K. college of Art and Crafts , for this golden opportunity.
Heartily thanks to my supervisor,Mr. Antaryami Das, who encouraged and
directed me. His challenges brought this work towards a completion. It is with his
supervision that this work came into existence. For any faults I take full
responsibility.

I am also deeply thankful to my informants. Their names cannot be disclosed, but

I want to acknowledge and appreciate their help and transparency during my
research. Their information have helped me complete this dissertation.

I also thank my family who encouraged me and prayed for me throughout the
time of my research.

May the almighty God richly bless all of you.

 ABSTRACT
Anjolie Ela Menon, (born July 17, 1940, Burnpur, Bengal [now in West Bengal],
India), Indian painter and muralist who was best known for her religious-themed
works, portraits, and nudes that incorporated a vibrant colour palette and were
rendered in a variety of styles ranging from cubism to techniques that recalled the
artists of the European Renaissance.

After graduating with a degree in English literature from the University of Delhi,

she was granted a scholarship from the French government and studied at
the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris, from 1959 to 1961. Menon’s preferred medium
was oil on masonite, which she applied by using a series of translucent colours
and thin washes. In addition to her paintings and murals, Menon worked in
several other mediums, including computer graphics and Murano glass. She
considered her style to be an antithesis of modern and postmodern techniques in
which paint was applied thickly on canvas. In 1997 she for the first time displayed
nonfigurative work, including Buddhist abstracts. She represented India at the
Paris, Algiers, and Sao Paulo biennales and at three Triennales in New Delhi.
Menon was awarded the Padma Shri, one of India’s highest civilian honours, in
2000.

 
 CONTENTS

1) ABOUT THE ARTIST

2) HER FAMOUS WORKS

3) FEW WORDS FOR HER

4)REFERENCES
 ABOUT THE ARTIST
Anjolie Ela Menon (born 1940) is one of India's leading contemporary artists. Her
paintings are in several major collections, including the NGMA, the Chandigarh
Museum and the Peabody Essex Museum. In 2006, her triptych work "Yatra" was
acquired by the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, California. Other works also
been a part of group exhibitions including 'Kalpana: Figurative Art in India',
presented by the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR) in London's Aicon
Gallery in 2009. Her preferred medium is oil on masonite, though she has also
worked in other media, including Murano glass, computer graphics and water
colour. She is a well known muralist. She was awarded the Padma Shree in 2000.
She lives and works in New Delhi.
Anjolie Ela Menon was born on 17 July 1940, in Burnpur, Bengal [now in West
Bengal], India and is of mixed Bengali and American parentage.She went
to Lawrence School, Lovedale in the Nilgiri Hills, Tamil Nadu. By the age of 15,
when she left school, she had already sold a few paintings. Thereafter, she briefly
studied at the Sir J.J. Institute of Applied Art, Mumbai and later earned a degree
in English literature from Delhi University, where she studied at the women's
college, Miranda House. During this time, she was drawn to the works
of Modigliani, and Indian painters, M F Husain and Amrita Shergil. At 18, she held
a solo exhibition with fifty-three paintings of a variety of styles. She obtained
a French Government scholarship to study at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris
from 1959 to 1961and she travelled extensively in Europe and West Asia
studying Romanesque and Byzantine art. During 1980-81, the governments of
France, U.K. and US invited her to pursue further studies.
Anjolie married her childhood love, Rear Admiral (Retd.) Raja Menon, an Indian
Navy officer turned strategic analyst and writer. She has two sons and four
grandchildren. Since her marriage, she has lived and worked in India, the US,
Europe, Japan and the erstwhile USSR. She collects works of other artists
including Aprita Singh, Rini Dumal, F.N. Souza, Jamini Roy, Ram Kumar, and K.G.
Subramanyam.
 HER FAMOUS WORK
Anjolie Ela Menon's preferred medium was oil on masonite, which she
applied by using a series of translucent colours and thin washes. In addition
to oil paintings and murals, she worked in several other mediums, including
computer graphics and Murano glass. She is best known for her religious-
themed works, portraits, and nudes that incorporated a vibrant colour
palette and were rendered in a variety of styles ranging from cubism to
techniques that recalled the artists of the European Renaissance. In 1997
she, for the first time displayed non-figurative work, including Buddhist
abstracts. She represented India at the Paris, Algiers, and São Paulo
Biennales and at three Triennales in New Delhi.
Being a well-known muralist, Anjolie Ela Menon has done over 35 solo
shows and many group shows in India and abroad. In 1968, 1972 and 1975,
she performed along with I, II, III International Triennale by Lalit Kala
Akademi, with Paris Biennale, France in 1980 and in 1980 at New York and
Washington D.C.
In the year 2000, Government of India conferred Anjolie Ela Menon with
the most prestigious Padma Shree Award. In the same year, she was
nominated to be on the board of trustees of the Indira Gandhi National
Centre for the Arts (IGNCA) — the only visual artist to have ever been
nominated.[9] In 2002, her work 'Four Decades' was shown in a major
exhibition organised by the Vadehra Art Gallery in the National Gallery of
Modern Art, Mumbai. The collection eventually toured other prominent
galleries in major Indian cities, including the Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath,
Bangalore. Her life and work has been featured in several publications and
films made for CNN and Doordarshan Channels.
( A Painting from Goat and Shepherd series)
( Two paintings from Goat and Shepherd series)
( A beautiful mural by Anjolie Ela Menon)
 ( A seated woman by the artist)

FEW WORDS FOR HER :

Throughout her career as a painter, Anjolie Ela Menon has regularly re-
envisioned her role as an artist. Menon's early canvases exhibited the varied
influences of van Gogh, the Expressionists, Modigliani, Amrita Sher-Gil, and M.
F. Husain. Mainly portraits, these paintings, according to the artist, “were
dominated by flat areas of thick bright colour, with sharp outlines that were
painted 'with the vigour and brashness of extreme youth'.” Menon admits that
her work has undergone tremendous changes with every phase of her life and
that as she has grown older, the narcissism of the early years has been
transformed into nostalgia for the past.

Menon took up art while still in school, and, by the time she was fifteen, had
already sold a couple of paintings. Finding the J.J. School of Art academically
stifling, in 1959, at the age of twenty, Menon departed India to study art in
Europe on a scholarship from the French Government. There, she was
influenced by her exposure to the techniques of medieval Christian artists.
While at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux Art in Paris, she began to experiment
with a muted palette of translucent colours, which she created by the repeated
application of oil paint in thin glazes. Painting on hardboard, Menon enhanced
the finely textured surface of her paintings by burnishing the finished work with
a soft dry brush, creating a glow reminiscent of medieval icons. Menon utilized
the characteristics of early Christian art – including the frontal perspective, the
averted head, and the slight body elongation – but took the female nude as a
frequent subject. The result is a dynamic relationship of the erotic and the
melancholy. Menon has developed this iconography of distance and loss in her
later works through her thematic depiction of black crows, empty chairs,
windows, and hidden figures.

It is extremely difficult to compartmentalize Menon’s work, not only because

she has been painting for so long, but because of the extreme changes that her
oeuvre has constantly undergone. She notes that “dissatisfaction is the source
of growth,” and encourages artists to “abandon known (and often acclaimed)
ground for new territory”. The body of work she has produced bears testament
to her disdain for categorization. Menon is more than happy to not fit into a
single category and be termed a maverick who finds self-expression in an idiom
out of context with the time and place in which she lives. She says “I am neither
a didactic nor narrative painter. I am hardly concerned with events, though I
like to lay my people bare – I like to bare them a bit beyond what is decent,
sometimes ripping open a chest to reveal the heart beating within. Of course,
there are many who have identified with the women I paint, especially those
who are trapped or sitting alone on a chair, or those innocent ones with a
newly-awakened sensuality, and those who are waiting.”

Menon also disapproves of reading only symbolism in her art. Threads,

necklaces, kites, the little animals or draped cloth, transparent or opaque, are
the accoutrements and trappings that accompany the figure in her work. These
are no conscious attempts at symbolism, sometimes it is mere ornamentation,
the essentially feminine need to embellish or embroider, at other times it is the
need to accent or to focus on the colour for purely painterly reasons such as
perspective or tension.

Menon notes, “when repeated often enough, a motif becomes a symbol which
in turn becomes a cliché; a cliché becomes an absurdity, a cartoon”. Therefore
in 1992, she staged an exhibit of household chairs, trunks and cupboards, all
painted with images appropriated from her own paintings. This radical
recontextualization of her work constituted a pre-emptive strike by Menon to
“remove art from its pedestal”. She continued the re-imagination of her corpus
in her “Mutations” series of pentimenti works form 1996, in which Menon
manipulated images from her best-known paintings on a computer, and
overpainted the print-outs with acrylics and oils.

Anjolie Ela Menon was awarded the Padma Shri, one of India’s highest civilian
honours, by the Government of India in 2000. Her most recent shows include
‘Menongitis-Three Generations of Art’ at Dhoomimal Gallery, New Delhi, in
2008; and ‘Gods and Others’ presented by Apparao Galleries at Admit One
Gallery, New York, in 2000. In 1998, the Times of India organized a retrospective
of her work at the Jehangir Art Gallery, and in 2002, another retrospective
exhibition titled ‘Four Decades’ was held in Mumbai and in Bangalore. Anjolie
Ela Menon has also been honoured with a six month solo show at the Asian Art
Museum, San Francisco, featuring her large triptych entitled ‘Yatra’ in 2006.

Menon’s works have been featured in several group exhibitions, including

'Kalpana: Figurative Art in India', presented by the Indian Council for Cultural
Relations (ICCR) at Aicon Gallery, London, in 2009; 'Mapping Memories – 2,
Painted Travelogues of Bali and Burma’ at Gallery Threshold, New Delhi, in
2008; and ‘Kitsch Kitsch Hota Hai’ at India Habitat Centre, New Delhi, in 2001.

( Madona and child by the artist)

REFERENCES:
1) WIKIPEDIA-https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anjolie_Ela_Menon
2) SAFFRON ART- https://www.saffronart.com/artists/anjolie-menon
3) BRITANICA- https://www.britannica.com/biography/Anjolie-Ela-
Menon
4) ARTNET-http://www.artnet.com/artists/anjolie-ela-menon/
5) ARTSY- https://www.artsy.net/artist/anjolie-ela-menon