Benode Behari Mukherjee led art beyond the dominance of literary
subjects and mythology, to a form that gave importance to
pictorial elements such as color, line and texture. As an artist,
he has experimented with many mediums, ranging from murals to
collage, from woodcuts to calligraphy, from watercolors, oil
paint, ink and crayons to graphics. He was known to record his
visual experiences on small cards, and occasionally in large
brush-and-ink drawings, or paintings. He explored the capacity to
show character in a subject through the juxtaposing of positive
and negative space. His prints like 'Girl', 'Evening Accounts',
or 'Man Seated' consciously hint at creating social commentaries,
setting the tone for the period of social realism that followed,
in the 1930's.
