A work by Suranjan Basu; (below) a photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson

When an artist, however talented, is ideologically driven, there may be a crisis of appreciation. Viewing the large and dynamic woodcuts and smaller prints being displayed at Suranjan Basu’s retrospective, now on at the Seagull Arts & Media Resource Centre, is quite an awesome experience.

In today’s art market hardly any artist worth his salt has any time for deprived and downtrodden labourers, beggars and roving musicians. But here is a talented artist, who died in his prime in 2002, and who produced a large body of significant work on the proletariat, and much else.

The great German painter, printmaker and sculptor Käthe Schmidt Kollwitz did the same and her works still move us. But when one realises that Basu had aligned himself with Left politics and that many of his works are quite openly propagandist, there is a sudden mental retreat, the undeniable power of his work notwithstanding.

However, one should not allow the proliferation of the hammer and sickle to spoil one’s enjoyment of Basu’s vitality, virtuosity and creativity, and also a well-curated and mounted exhibition, which is a rare treat in this city.

This exhibition titled Tribute to Henri Cartier-Bresson at Bose Pacia does not pretend to be a definitive show of this great photographer’s works.

It does have quite a few prints on display, some of them rarely seen. Each photograph is accompanied by a comment by some expert or personal acquaintance of the photographer and this enriches our experience. Some of them have a hint of mystery like the one of the duck swimming in a shadowy pond. Three men stand on a transformer box with their backs turned to the camera, intently listening to distant sounds in a bleak German city — a perfect yet unusual document of protest.

The hands of a man in jeans with a naked torso and face out of frame are contorted, as if in despair.

Matisse paints his model with his back to the camera. One is constantly reminded that Cartier-Bresson had mastered the art of watching and waiting to click his shutter at just the right moment. Even when the two lesbians were flinging themselves at each other. And when the wicked pas de trois in the beauty salon had reached a state of equilibrium.

Photographs are also being exhibited at Ganges Art Gallery. The problem is that many of them are digital prints, and one does not really know whether his software or Ameet Mallapur himself should get the credit for his work.

The same holds for Deepak Tandon’s works. Ian Umeda goes real close to his subjects and although these are digital prints, there isn’t much to manipulate in those images except for their colour.

Both Naquib Hossain and Susan Aurinko have stark visions, at their best when they photograph architecture or the intricate designs discovered in the most ordinary things.

Naveen Kishore’s mannequins take their artiness rather too seriously, and Sanjeet Chowdhury’s fairs are quite pedestrian. Anirban Das Mahapatra’s Dargah urchin wearing outsized sunglasses is worth a second look.

Chandra Bhattacharjee has a rather pretentious title for his run-of-the mill exhibition at Galerie 88.

The iron grilles notwithstanding, these are no more than large portraits of young men. His smaller works are more precisely conceived. He paints visions of a lost Arcadia on acrylic sheets mounted on rectangles of rusty iron.

Bent rectangular sheets of either paper or cardboard drift down young Sunando Basu’s canvases or form floral designs. He paints them in various shades but that doesn’t improve their quality.

His exhibition at K2 also features a clumsily put together installation of coloured threads, blocks of wood and what are ostensibly the goddess Lakshmi’s footprints. It is an altogether ill-conceived and pointless show.

Artistic pretensions and wrongheadness (some would call it a con) collide at Anant Art in Alipore, whose floors have been covered with loam and sprouting seeds by Pradeep L. Mishra, who calls himself an artist but is actually a dauber.

His so-called art works depicting bullocks ploughing fields and farmers are of a miserable quality. Wonder how the gallerist had the nerve to invite people to this exhibition.