Important Notice

The present lot, with its expansive colour fields signals a shift towards abstraction from Padamsee's structured landscapes of the early 1960s. The fiery red that forms the central band, sandwiched between the darker horizontals, is a precursor to Padamsee's Metascape series that followed in the 1970s, dominated by richly textured and vivid palettes of red and blue. In works such as the present lot, Padamsee began constructing landscapes... The present lot, with its expansive colour fields signals a shift towards abstraction from Padamsee's structured landscapes of the early 1960s. The fiery red that forms the central band, sandwiched between the darker horizontals, is a precursor to Padamsee's Metascape series that followed in the 1970s, dominated by richly textured and vivid palettes of red and blue. In works such as the present lot, Padamsee began constructing landscapes focussing on form, structure and colour, which were devoid of indications of space and time. This painting shares a sensibility of abstraction in the landscape with Padamsee's 1963 painting titled Delta, in which too, colours are layered to suggest a ghost-like fluidity which defies identification.

Padamsee's works from the 1960s, as seen in the present lot, "...tend towards stark and dark reduction, resulting in compositions that appear significantly more conceptualized than the earlier series, if still legible and oriented as landscapes... by formally pulling back and presenting angular, broad panoramas of unpopulated land, Padamsee draws the viewer's attention to the rhetorical emptiness of these landscapes; that is, rather than these vistas appearing coincidentally or casually as if there are no people passing through them, they demonstrate a conscious, strategic approach to appear exclusively non-figural." (Bhanumati Padamsee and Annapurna Garimella eds., Akbar Padamsee: Work in Language, Mumbai: Marg Publications and Pundole Art Gallery, 2010, pp. 206, 208)

JEAN-MARIE DROT

The present lot was acquired by Jean-Marie Drot, a well-known French writer and documentary filmmaker. Born in Nancy in 1929, Drot was considered an illustrious pioneer of French cultural television. In 1960, Drot began filming a documentary series on the old quarter of Montaparnasse, once the heart of the cultural life of Paris where artists, poets and intellectuals gathered. Les Heures Chaudes de Montparnasse, a 14-episode series faithfully recreated the flamboyant art scene of 1920s Paris, and demonstrated Drot's talent as an incisive documentarian. Drot also produced monographic films on several other individual artists of the Ecole de Paris, including, among others, Amedeo Modigliani, Alberto Giacometti and Marcel Duchamp.

With his significant contributions to the field of art and culture, Drot was appointed cultural advisor to the French embassy in Greece and director of the Institut Francais d'Athens from 1982 to 1984. The following year he became director of the Acad??mie de France at Villa Medici in Rome, Italy. Accompanied by his friend, the novelist and art historian Andre Malraux, Drot travelled to many parts of the world, experiencing many cultures. He was passionate about collecting art and acquired many works by European and international artists, including Indian modernists Akbar Padamsee and S H Raza. The present lot was part of the Jean-Marie Drot's extensive collection of world art.

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