Important Notice

Lot 43

 

Quick Zoom

“The ship is an invitation to paradox: one remains stationary while being in motion on it, and so it presents itself as the most fitting rendition of Sabavala’s underlying theme of passage between a here and an elsewhere that shift definition all the time.”
(Ranjit Hoskote, “Coming Home to a Strange Land: 1951-1959,” The Crucible of Painting: The Art of Jehangir Sabavala, Mumbai: Eminence Designs, 2005, p. 68)

Born in... “The ship is an invitation to paradox: one remains stationary while being in motion on it, and so it presents itself as the most fitting rendition of Sabavala’s underlying theme of passage between a here and an elsewhere that shift definition all the time.”
(Ranjit Hoskote, “Coming Home to a Strange Land: 1951-1959,” The Crucible of Painting: The Art of Jehangir Sabavala, Mumbai: Eminence Designs, 2005, p. 68)

Born in 1922 in Bombay, Jehangir Sabavala studied at prestigious art institutions around the world, each of which contributed to his maturity as a painter with a distinctive style that transcended its original influences and defies classification. He earned his diploma at the J J School of Art, Bombay, in 1944 after which he enrolled at the Heatherley School of Art in London from 1945 to 1947 where he was schooled in British academic techniques and naturalism. Between 1947 and 1949, he focussed on the study of luminosity, stroke, and colour associated with Impressionism at the Académie Julian, Paris. Shortly after, he was introduced to the tenets of Cubism-which would later become an integral part of his technique-under the tutelage of André Lhote at the Académie Lhote between 1949 and 1951.

Since the beginning of his career in the early 1950s, Sabavala worked most often in oils, creating landscapes, seascapes and figures that were aesthetically sublime and laced with philosophical thought. In a letter to his biographer, poet and art critic Ranjit Hoskote, the artist remarked that landscapes were a “liberation, for the first time, from the various disciplines and schools of painting which were my equipment. I felt instantly at home with a scene that could be moulded into whatever form that I wished it to take. This eventually developed into my mountain/cloud/sea/dune forms. These became distinctly mine and not as depicted by anyone else.” (Ranjit Hoskote, “From Landscape to Cosmos: 1962-1964,” The Crucible of Painting: The Art of Jehangir Sabavala, Mumbai: Eminence Designs, 2005, p. 98)

Located between the real and the ideal, the artist’s landscapes and seascapes were inspired by his extensive travels across Europe and India. He would often sketch various forms that he observed in a notebook, later combining elements and “colour notes” from different drawings to create a single canvas. His paintings are meticulously constructed with highly nuanced colour planes, resulting in images that are unique in their restraint while appearing emotionally charged.

The present lot, painted in 1988, is an eminent example of Sabavala’s mastery over light, colour, and texture that set him apart from his modernist peers. The artist often preferred a muted palette with veiled light and middle tones over pure colours and intense imagery. Drawing on the Cubist influences of André Lhote and Lyonel Feininger-both of whom he regarded highly-he built scenes by wedging together a series of geometric planes. These receding planes give each canvas an illusory sense of depth, and in this work, are used to depict a ship adrift on a choppy sea, simultaneously evoking a sense of stillness and motion.

Hoskote remarks, “In Sabavala’s paintings of the 1980s and 1990s, the universe is heard to speak in a voice capable of many nuances. ‘One is moved,’ he says, ‘by the sweep, the drama, the magnificent changeability of nature.’ Transposing his interior drama of turmoil and exhilaration onto the tide, the wind, the awesome spectacle of a storm rending the earth open, the artist offers homage to the cosmos, the original creation.” (Hoskote, “A Crystalline Alchemy: 1983-1988,” p. 144)

Noting the classical influences underlying Sabavala’s modernist style, writer Richard Lannoy (who had been closely associated with the artist since their time as students in London) observes that he painstakingly developed a technique that is quite rare in modern oil painting, “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...His mastery of light effects is based on a lifetime’s study of natural Indian light without resort to banal naturalism.” (Richard Lannoy, “The Paradoxical Alliance: A Portrait Essay by Richard Lannoy,” The Crucible of Painting: The Art of Jehangir Sabavala, Mumbai: Eminence Designs, 2005, p. 16)

By presenting an idealised, rather than realistic, version of nature that was transmuted by his brush through constant improvisations, Sabavala skilfully balanced precision of technique with an artistic quest towards the sublime. It is these qualities that have earned him a distinguished position in the canon of modern Indian art. Affirms art critic V S Vasudev, “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 realised 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)

Read More
Artist Profile
Other works of this artist in: this auction  |  entire site