Uma Nair explores the artists’ visions whose works will feature in the September sale of South Asian modern and contemporary art at the Asian Art Week, New York
Modernist painters used their brush strokes to showcase and comment on the micro as well as the macro issues in Indian society, for which they are still celebrated.
Featuring works by masters like Tyeb Mehta, Akbar Padamsee, Francis Newton Souza, Bikash Bhattacharjee and Syed Haider Raza, alongside works by artists Nasreen Mohamedi, Maqbool Fida Husain, Vasudeo S. Gaitonde, Ram Kumar and others, Christie’s September sale of South Asian Modern and Contemporary Art will take place on September 12 during the Asian Art Week New York. Six works stand apart for their vitality and brilliance. The sale includes 89 lots and is expected to realise more than $7 million.
Tyeb’s Diagonal XV
leading the sale and the exhibition is a masterpiece by Tyeb Mehta, Diagonal XV, painted in 1975 (estimate: $1,500,000 to $2,000,000), which will be unveiled during the Mumbai preview. In the present work, the focus is on two fragmented figures at the centre further divided by a green and orange lightning-bolt. Heightened against the deep maroon ground, these splintered figures communicate the trauma of not being whole and together, representative perhaps of the violent centrifugal forces at play in the larger social context to which they belong. Paintings from the diagonal series are the first of Mehta’s mature style and mark a watershed in his long engagement with figuration.
Nishad Avari, specialist, head of sale and associate vice-president Christies, reminisces about Tyeb and says, “Having had the privilege of seeing several works by the artist over the last 15 years, I am still amazed by the sophistication and potency of Mehta’s quintessential icons — the falling figure, the trussed bull, the rickshaw puller — every time I encounter them. The artist seems to freeze these compelling moments in his large paintings, inviting the viewer to become part of them. For me, his paintings invoke wonder and devastation in equal measure as he reveals truths that continue to be as relevant and universal today as when he created his paintings.”
Padamsee’s Rooftops
Another highlight and cover lot of the sale catalogue is Akbar Padamsee’ Rooftops, painted in 1959 (estimate: $800,000 to $1,200,000). Completed upon his return to Mumbai in 1959 from a second trip to Paris, Padamsee embarked on what was arguably one of the most ambitious projects of his extensive artistic career. Progressively eliminating colour from his work, he began to paint only in shades of grey on a scale he had not attempted before. The present lot is the first of Padamsee’s scroll-like paintings of his “grey period.” A panoramic composition with no linear narrative or any definite beginning and end, this dense landscape is almost entirely filled by block-like architectural forms, abutting each other on what looks like a gentle hillside. Not only does Rooftops represent a momentous point of departure in his oeuvre, it is also a critical meditation on colour, form and movement — an examination of the very act of painting, and one that continues to shape and inform the artist’s work.
Souza’s Family
Founder of the Progressives, Francis Newton Souza’s Family is a stunning portrait done in the manner of yesteryear portraiture replete with Catholic symbolism. The rosary necklace and the Madonna on the wall give us Souza’s continual references to his childhood when he was taken to Mass by his grandmother. Painted in 1946, this 22-year-old “revolutionary” painted Family, a scathing socio-economic portrait deeply influenced by his Marxist views and the political climate in India at the time. Although it bears thematic similarities with Van Gogh’s famous 1885 canvas, The Potato Eaters, this painting offers a more confrontational perspective on the circumstances of the working class, closely allied with the work of social realist, Mexican revolutionary and German expressionist artists.
Raza’s le lac and Paysage
Two early works by Sayed Haider Raza affirm his versatility as a landscape expressionist. For him, the 1950s were a stirring period of achievement and experimentation. Paysage was painted in 1958, almost a decade after the artist’s arrival in France, by which time Raza had gained critical recognition, including becoming the first foreign artist to be awarded the Prix de la Critique in 1956. The painting was exhibited in 1959.
Acquired at that time, Paysage has remained in the same collection ever since and is one of the finest examples of the landscapes in which the artist distances himself from the subject matter to liberate his palette and brushwork. The second work is le lac. His landscapes of the period evolve from a representational approach towards one focussed on colours and their power to evoke emotional responses in the viewer. Painted in 1964, le lac belongs to a key period in Raza’s career, during which he began to experiment with a less structured pictorial space and explored the translucent play of colour in nature.
Bikash’s Jhumki
Dark and resplendent in the colours of the night is Bikash Bhattacharjee’s Jhumki painted in 1988. Quite a few of his oil paintings from the 1980s and 1990s are sensitively rendered portraits of unkempt child labourers from city slums. In the present painting titled Jhumki (earring), set against a background of ominous black, is a small unclothed beggar child wearing just a necklace and an armband.
Her eyes have a haunting quality to them as they draw the viewer’s gaze to her scarred but radiant face. Bhattacharjee held a strong belief in the potential for shadows to create drama in even seemingly mundane compositions. Here, the artist builds a narrative around the mood brought about by his shadows, relying on both his technical mastery and the natural allegorical tendencies of darkness. “I prefer to lay the dark colours first and then build up the lights and the highlights. This process has helped me give dimension to my pictures to say what I want to, and also to give canvas the texture and characters that I desire,” said the Bengal master.