“Painting for me grows more personalised, more difficult. Movements, styles, the topical moments, all lose out to the attempt to reach deeper levels of interpretation.”
- JEHANGIR SABAVALA

Jehangir Sabavala, who began his career in the late 1940s, chose not to align himself with any particular artistic movement but was rather guided by an inner search for transformation and a pursuit of the sublime. Art critic S V Vasudev once... “Painting for me grows more personalised, more difficult. Movements, styles, the topical moments, all lose out to the attempt to reach deeper levels of interpretation.”
- JEHANGIR SABAVALA

Jehangir Sabavala, who began his career in the late 1940s, chose not to align himself with any particular artistic movement but was rather guided by an inner search for transformation and a pursuit of the sublime. Art critic S V Vasudev once said, “There are a few artists who in the course of a generation of the contemporary movement in India, have made an indelible impression on the mind and have also revealed in their progress the nature of the artistic quest… Today Jehangir Sabavala’s paintings reveal the refinement of a poetic mind, the abstract sign posts of a philosophical search for values, the painterly technique realized after years of experience, and, above all, the singular note that keeps alive the wonder in creation.” (Pria Devi, Jehangir Sabavala, New Delhi: Lalit Kala Akademi, 1984)

The present lot was painted in 1998, a period when Sabavala found himself at a crossroads having arrived at the precipice of his sixth decade as an artist. As he sought to reinvent his practice, he began a phase characterised simultaneously by experimentation and a return to his artistic roots where he “addressed himself again to the primary contours of his interior reality, revisiting his own dominant themes and retracing the course of his preoccupations since the late 1940s.” (Ranjit Hoskote, “Patterns of Return,” The Crucible of Painting, The Art of Jehangir Sabavala, Mumbai: Eminence Designs, 2005, p. 166)

Nature remained the artist’s primary subject during this time, harkening back to childhood summers spent amidst the Sahyadri hills at Matheran and Mahabaleshwar and in the lush garden of his family’s vacation home in Pune. Remarking on his works of this decade critic and curator Ranjit Hoskote writes, “...perhaps the most distinctive feature of Sabavala’s art practice is his continuing devotion to the restrained ideal of the beautiful, even in a period of absolute war, mathematically programmed genocide and forced migration, when human experience has pushed art towards the extreme conditions of the sublime and the grotesque… His recent paintings make it clearer than ever that Sabavala’s art derives its crucial tension from the dialectic between the actual and the idealised.” (Hoskote, p. 176)

The present canvas depicts a flock of butterflies who have perhaps been suddenly disturbed at night. The scene is interpreted by Sabavala in his signature style in which he idealises the forms of nature through a crystalline geometry. Rather than a realistic representation, the butterflies are painted as jagged geometric forms wedged together, their bright jewel tones appearing luminescent against a dark background. Hoskote notes that Sabavala concurred that paintings such as the present lot “proceed by a polarity between open and tangled forms, or intimacy and blandness… these are volatile fantasias that point to a deeply felt private experience of disturbance and beauty.” (Hoskote, p. 190)

This distinctive appearance of Sabavala’s paintings is the result of the amalgamation-and his personal interpretation-of the academic painting and Cubist techniques he studied as a young man in London and Paris, respectively. André Lhote, under whom he learnt the tenets of Cubism at the Académie Lhote in Paris between 1949 and 1951, became one of the three main figures who influenced his work. As Hoskote explains, it was not the ideology of the movement that attracted Sabavala, but, rather, its formal characteristics. ‘Cubism ingrained in him a firm appreciation of light and structure; but it constrained him as he forged ahead and grew into an acceptance of a deep-seated classicising tendency within himself.’” (Ranjit Hoskote, Pilgrim, Exile, Sorcerer, The Painterly Evolution of Jehangir Sabavala, Mumbai, Mumbai: Eminence Designs, 1998, p. 23)

The 1960s brought about another significant change in Sabavala’s work as he decided to break away from the formality of Cubism on the advice of Hungarian art historian Charles Fabri. His encounter with the works of Lyonel Feininger at this time “softened his paintings; the indispensable presence of illumination became his subject… the harsh edges of the objects’ broken selves began to give way to shards and shafts thrown around a central presence…” (Hoskote, p. 95) This suffusion of light, which can be observed in the present lot, was brought about by a painstaking technique that Sabavala developed which is quite rare in modern oil painting. According to the artist’s friend, writer Richard Lannoy, this was “based on transparency, glazes, effects of inwardly glowing objects obtained by exploiting the white of the canvas as a kind of back lighting. This gives the surface of his paintings a glistening crystalline sheen. The individual hues and tones, being mixed separately in subtly but cleanly differentiated gradations, impart to the picture surface a cleanness and clarity of hue which is very unusual…” (Richard Lannoy, “The Paradoxical Alliance: A Portrait Essay by Richard Lannoy,” Pilgrim, Exile, Sorcerer, The Painterly Evolution of Jehangir Sabavala, p. 16)

The present lot is thus eminent proof of Sabavala’s unceasing search for the transcendental, enabled by a communion with both the self and his environment, even towards the end of his career. It is the work of “an accomplished painter who asks himself what further revelations painting has to offer him, and what further nuances he has to offer painting.” (Hoskote, p. 180)

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