Artist Partha Bhattacharjee’s Devi Series, produced primarily from 1990s, is the body of work for which he is most celebrated. It earned him the President of India’s silver plaque for the best work of 2000-2001, awarded by the All India Fine Arts and Crafts Society. But an award, however prestigious, only marks the surface of what these paintings actually are. They are a theological argument made visible — and one of the most quietly radical acts in modern Indian art.
The Technique: Trompe-l’oeil as Spiritual Statement
The Devi Series is built on Trompe-l’oeil — the Renaissance technique of painting with such photographic precision that the eye is deceived into seeing three dimensions where only two exist. Partha spent years studying and mastering this technique, partly through his commissioned copies of European masters: Rembrandt, Renoir, Vermeer, Titian. He understood better than most how illusion operates — how a surface can seem to recede, how light can seem to fall from a direction it doesn’t come from, how depth can appear where there is only flatness.
In the Devi Series, this technique becomes a metaphor. The ordinary Indian woman you see — struggling in a rural courtyard, moving through an urban market, going about the daily business of keeping a world running — Partha saw goddess in every woman. The goddess is the third dimension you cannot quite locate but also cannot deny. The illusion is not a trick. It is the truth.
The Philosophy Behind the Vision
Partha was, throughout his career, what one might call a theologian of the everyday. He believed, with absolute conviction, in the ancient feminine life force underlying all existence — an energy he identified as the Adi Shakti, the primal divine feminine. He felt genuine pain, he said, when he witnessed the conditions in which women lived in his time in India. The gap between what women actually are — manifestations of the supreme divine — and how the world treats them was a wound he carried throughout his career.
The Devi Series was where he worked out that wound. Not with rage or polemic but with a visual argument of extraordinary patience and precision: here is a woman. Look at her carefully. Now look again. Do you see what I see? Because what I see is the goddess. She was always here.
The Series That Grew
The Devi Series did not stay static. It evolved across decades, eventually giving rise to the Sekal-Ekal (Then and Now) Series, which placed the divine feminine in conversation with historical time — showing that the goddess was present then, is present now, and will be present regardless of the conditions that surround her. The Dawn to Dusk, Mask, and Musician Series of the same period surrounded the Devi work with related explorations: of how the sacred moves through ordinary time, of how we reveal and conceal ourselves, of music as its own form of prayer.
In his final years, after a 2017 cerebral attack damaged his vision and redirected him toward dry pastels and Indian folk traditions, the divine feminine reemerged in the Mahakal and Durga Series — goddess paintings in the rural art idiom of West Bengal, where Durga and Parvati are understood as two aspects of the same supreme being. The trident of the warrior and the lotus of the beloved, held in the same hand.
The Devi Series, and the broader body of work it connects to, rewards the kind of sustained, patient attention that the best art demands. Each canvas is an invitation to look until you see what Partha saw.
For those who are ready to do that work, a visit to https://parthabhattacharjee.com/available-indian-and-fine-artwork/ is the right place to start — artwork from his final years, where the folk traditions of Madhubani, Warli, and Patachitra meet the depth of his spiritual inquiry, represents some of the most significant and moving Indian painting of the past three decades.
