Ramkinkar Baij

1906

Born on 25 May at Bankura to an economically weak family. Though 1906 is the generally accepted year of his birth, alternate dates vary from 1904 to 1910.

1925

Takes admission at Kala Bhavana on the advice of Ramananda Chatterjee, a friend of Rabindranath Tagore, and publisher of Bengali periodicals, Prabasi and The Modern Review.

1928

Viennese sculptor Liza von Pott takes sculpture classes at Kala Bhavana with Baij and Sudhir Khastgir as students.

1929

Completes his course at Kala Bhavana.

1932-33

He teaches art briefly at Modern School, New Delhi. Makes a relief sculpture of Saraswati for the hostel at Modern School. Joins the faculty of the sculpture department at Kala Bhavana alongside Nandalal Bose and Benode Behari Mukherjee, where he remains for most of his career.

1935

Makes a sculpture portrait of Ustad Allauddin Khan on the latter’s visit to Santiniketan.

1936

He makes the tall sculpture Sujata, modelled on Jaya Appasamy, a student at the time in Kala Bhavana, who went on to be a noted critic and art historian.

1938

Completes Santhal Family, arguably India’s first modernist public sculpture, made with cement and laterite mortar and depicting tribal peasants. The same year, he makes The Poet, a study in cement of Rabindranath Tagore’s head that stands out for its startling distortion. It is his most abstract sculpture and the only such strongly subjective and nonhagiographic portrait of Tagore by any artist.

1940

Completes Lamp Stand, considered the country’s first abstract sculpture. The same year, a few months before Tagore’s death, he makes a highly realist bust of the Nobel laureate from life. An ailing Tagore appears frail and brooding, without arms, his back bent.

1944

A student organises a joint exhibition of his works along with those of Benode Behari Mukherjee at New Delhi.

1945

He is invited by the Government of Nepal to make sculptures.

1946-47

Makes a sculpture portrait of Abanindranath Tagore based on three sittings of fifteen minutes each.

1948

Visits Shillong, and paints several atmospheric watercolours of its mountainous landscape. Makes a small sculpture of Mahatma Gandhi, now in the collection of the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi. It is cast in the mid-1970s by Bipin Behari Goswami for Lalit Kala Akademi.

1949

Visits the north Indian hills and paints several mountainscapes.

1950

Participates in the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, Paris, and with the Salon de Mai the following year.

1956

Makes Mill Call, his last monumental outdoor sculpture.

1956-57

He is commissioned by the Reserve Bank of India to make two sculptures based on classical Indian sculpture. The two monumental works, Yaksha and Yakshi, are completed and installed on site at the entrance to the RBI headquarters in New Delhi only a decade later.

1968

Makes a sculpture of Mahatma Gandhi in Santiniketan.

1969

Paints a cubist oil, Atomica, on the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan.

1970

Is awarded the Padma Bhushan by the Government of India.

1975

Ritwik Ghatak makes a documentary on him that remains incomplete.

1976

Is made a fellow of the Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi. Is conferred an honorary doctoral degree, Desikottama, by Visva-Bharati.

1979

Receives an honorary D. Litt from Rabindra Bharati University, Calcutta.

1980

Dies in Calcutta following a brief illness.

2012

A posthumous retrospective of Baij’s work is held at the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, curated by his one-time student at Santiniketan, the sculptor, K. S. Radhakrishnan.