Important Notice

For virtually his entire career, V S Gaitonde remained somewhat unrecognized and eventually went into self imposed seclusion. His art has, in recent times, generated the kind of interest that he never saw during his lifetime. His uniquely sophisticated artistic sensibility has earned him an indisputable place in the Indian and international modern art world.

Gaitonde(1924 - 2001) is widely regarded as India's foremost abstractionist,... For virtually his entire career, V S Gaitonde remained somewhat unrecognized and eventually went into self imposed seclusion. His art has, in recent times, generated the kind of interest that he never saw during his lifetime. His uniquely sophisticated artistic sensibility has earned him an indisputable place in the Indian and international modern art world.

Gaitonde(1924 - 2001) is widely regarded as India's foremost abstractionist, though he himself believed that there was no such thing as abstract art. Rather, he considered his art non-objective and non-conformist. His earlier works are characteristically plain, large surfaces with subtle layers of paint with a self-contained quality of light.

"Such sources indigenous to India convey that Gaitonde was to become a universalist in sensibility and idealism. For it was the diversity of the Indian subcontinent's cultures, faiths, ideologies and customs that nurtured in him the curiosity, even in the wilful imperative, to seek out those larger universalities underpinning and bridging the diverse cultures and civilizations" (G Roger Denson, 'The Light In the Cave: Vasudeo S. Gaitonde and His Painted Perceptions Shine at the Guggenheim', Huffington Post Arts & Culture, 24 October 2014).

His later work evolved into an exploration of the visual possibilities of form and calligraphy. Gaitonde's calligraphic paintings from the 1980s onwards draw from the characters of the Indus Valley or Harappan script, itself an enigmatic riddle as yet unsolved - a formal system without any known referencing or precedents. The present lot further tests the possibilities of form through technique. The deliberate burning of the edges of the paper give it the possibility of association with parchments harking to an ancient past.


Krishna Riboud (1927 - 2000)

This work of Gaitonde comes from the collection of Krishna Riboud. Born in Dhaka to Rajendra Roy and Ena Tagore, a niece of Rabindranath Tagore, she won a scholarship to attend Wellesley College in the US in 1945. Introduced by famed photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson to Jean Riboud, she married him in Connecticut in 1949.

Krishna Riboud was an historian, collector of Indian and Chinese textiles, patron of the arts and powerful political hostess. The Ribouds were members of Europe's elite political and social circles and friends to political leaders, including President Francois Mitterrand, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and General Ne Win of Burma. As a collector, Krishna amassed immense knowledge about the art of America, Europe and Asia, which she collected through years of study at the Musee Guimet in Paris, and in the museums of London, New Delhi, St. Petersburg and Japan.

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