In this biography
Quick facts
- Born
- 1904
- Died
- 1980
- Birthplace
- India
- Country
- India
- Nationality
- Not independently established
- Known for
- Santiniketan murals, especially Life of the Medieval Saints, and later tactile and paper works
Why this life matters
His career connects looking, bodily movement, public architecture and several ways of making images, rather than treating eyesight as the only condition of art.
Timeline
Key moments
Santiniketan
He entered Tagore’s experimental school.
Teaching
He joined the art faculty.
Saints mural
A multi-wall project brought a historical subject into Hindi Bhavana.
Return to teaching
New working methods accompanied later art and writing.
Education in an experimental setting
Benode Behari Mukherjee was born in 1904. Poor eyesight affected the form of his early education, and he entered Rabindranath Tagore’s Santiniketan school in 1917. When Kala Bhavana opened in 1919, he joined its early students under Nandalal Bose. The setting connected art with observed nature, reading and communal life. He became a teacher in 1925, helping develop the same institution that had made his own education possible.
Sources for this section: [1]
Murals as public work
Mukherjee worked across painting, drawing, print and mural. The 1940 ceiling mural of village life and the 1942 Cheena Bhavana work brought images into inhabited buildings. Life of the Medieval Saints, painted in 1946–47 at Hindi Bhavana, organised a large historical subject across three walls with named assistants. Scale mattered, but so did the viewer’s changing attention in a room. These were works encountered in community spaces rather than merely enlarged versions of small pictures.
Travel and a change of setting
In 1949 he became a curator at Nepal’s government museum, making drawings and watercolours alongside that work. After returning to India he taught elsewhere and developed art training with his wife Leela. Such activities broaden the career beyond one campus, even though Santiniketan remained a central point of return. His travel studies, murals and prints demonstrate several ways in which observation could become a made sequence or a structured surface.
Sources for this section: [2]
Continuing after the loss of sight
Mukherjee lost his remaining sight in 1956. He continued making collages and modelled forms with assistance, returned to teach at Santiniketan in 1958 and developed writing and art theory. Honours and the publication of Chitrakar accompanied later recognition; he died in 1980. His career should not be reduced to a simple triumph-over-disability slogan. It involved changing materials, collaborators and working methods across decades. The continuity lies in an artist’s ability to organise relations, remember forms and think through making, while the conditions of that work changed substantially. The 1979 publication of Chitrakar gave his reflections a further public form. Writing belongs to the later creative practice itself, not only to the biographical evidence through which other people remember his earlier images.
Quick answers
Frequently asked questions about Benode Behari Mukherjee
- Did Mukherjee stop making art after losing his sight?
- No. He continued through collages, modelled forms, writing and teaching, with changed methods and assistance.
- Who helped make the Hindi Bhavana mural?
- The NGMA names Jitendra Kumar, Leela Mukherjee, Devaki Nandan Sharma and K.G. Subramanyan as assistants.
Keep exploring
Lives connected to this story
- Nandalal Bose
Read the teacher and colleague central to Mukherjee’s Santiniketan formation.
- Ramkinkar Baij
Read a fellow Kala Bhavana teacher working across public form and everyday life.
Sources and further reading
Explore the evidence
These references support the biography and offer further reading. Official records, first-person accounts and independent reporting provide different perspectives; image records document attribution and licensing.
- 1. Visva-BharatiBenodebehari Mukhopadhyay
- 2. National Gallery of Modern ArtFacing the Light: artist profile
The virtual biography’s “Missouri” is not adopted as a geographic fact. The verified Indian training and travel phases are described without reproducing that typo.
- 3. National Gallery of Modern ArtBenodebehari Mukherjee: Murals
- 4. Ministry of Culture / Press Information BureauPrintmaking exhibition 2014