CONSUMBRISM OF ART 5 The new technological innovations invaded all branches of production, and artists' materials (i.e. pigments, brushes, bending media, canvas and paper) began to be produced on a mass scale. This rendered devices like 'chemical analysis' of paintings (used to determine the date of the ancient art objects) inadequate to assess the original quality of subsequent art products. Secondly, the capitalist ethos transforming art into commodity constructed a system of decoding art, which dominated art galleries, museums and all institutions of public instruction. Every art object selected for display depended upon conscious choice, to determine which aspect of past and present art can be deemed suitable to acquire the significance of heritage. When the modern Bengali artist suddenly found himself catapulted into the world market as a producer, he had only two options open to him: either to acknowledge the entire Western tradition of 'great art' as his own, or to identify with nationalist art. The former was given to him through a colonial art-education scheme. To accept it was to concede to the idea of the 'artist genius' with a special position. He would then remain alone, an outsider to the social norms of his country still dominated by a surviving pre-capitalist ethos. His other choice lay in his immediate tradition, that of a nationalist art, which in the given historical moment of the Swadeshi movement had erected from the court tradition an art heritage. By the mid-twenties this was transformed into a mechanised formula, emphasising a spiritual essence in pictorial terms. Jamini Roy's contemporaries regarded the formula as a particular phase in academic training, largely irrelevant to the construction of any reality. It was in order to formulate for himself another option that Jamini Roy tried to create an alternative tradition, (in his words) that of the ^Karigar9. By this, he not only indulged in a nostalgic art, he also denied the realities of his social relations. He became a problem. II The obituary notice in The Statesman (24 April, 1972) began : "Mr. Jamini Roy, the legendary artist of Bengal and creator of a new style of Indian painting died at his residence on Monday". This 'legendary' Jamini Roy was the creation of the Bengali 'bhadralok' of Roy's time, seeking its own identity. Caught between a colonial hangover and a feeling of nationalism bordering on chauvinism, the middleclass intelligentsia were oscillating between two extremes. The new style created by Jamini Roy suddenly offered three possibilities of release. It was reminiscent of the folk forms, the survival of a past tradition which was unmistakably Indian or rather Bengali, thus providing a cultural root. Second, the strong lines were comparable to those used by contemporary European artists like Leger. A link was forged with the international world of art, so necessary to the progressive Indian in the late 1930s. Thirdly, to the younger