Important Notice

Painted in 1967, Stag-Antlered Trees was made at a time when Jehangir Sabavala transitioned from his Cubist learnings to a more personal, free-flowing artistic language. During the 1960s, Sabavala made a conscious attempt at transcending the principles of Cubism which he had learnt at the Academie Andre Lhote a decade earlier. By the mid-1960s, he realised "the dangers of an over- reliance on fragmentation... [and] began his trek, his... Painted in 1967, Stag-Antlered Trees was made at a time when Jehangir Sabavala transitioned from his Cubist learnings to a more personal, free-flowing artistic language. During the 1960s, Sabavala made a conscious attempt at transcending the principles of Cubism which he had learnt at the Academie Andre Lhote a decade earlier. By the mid-1960s, he realised "the dangers of an over- reliance on fragmentation... [and] began his trek, his outward spiralling towards the vast horizons lit by a cloudy incandescence that have held his unwavering attention." (Ranjit Hoskote, The Crucible of Painting: The Art of Jehangir Sabavala, Mumbai: Eminence Designs Pvt. Ltd., 2005, p. 86) In a revealing statement to the American art critic George Butcher in 1964, Sabavala wrote, "No longer am I satisfied with the juxtaposition of planes, the search for rare colour, the almost total denigration of the unpremeditated. It is the intangible which is now my goal. Space and light, and an element of mystery begin to permeate my canvasses." This shift in style is visible in Stag Antlered- Trees. The shrouded, spectre-like figures are slightly stooped, as if carrying a burden on their shoulders as they trudge towards a distant horizon. They make their way past leafless trees with barren boughs, set against a monochromatic expanse of brown. Sabavala constructs his canvas with a palette knife, building texture and creating a dream-like landscape.

The present lot forms an important part of Sabavala's continued interest in the themes of prophets, pilgrims in exile, and journeys, which he explored in subsequent decades. In a monograph on the artist, which features the present lot, Dilip Chitre writes about Stag-Antlered Trees observing, "Throughout the period 1965-75, certain configurations of images recur in Sabavala's work. The elements in this painting, for instance, are familiar aspects of the inner landscape of Sabavala: the distant horizon, the rising hill, the curved beach and the sea beyond it, and the hooded women moving away from the viewer. The bare trees and the women hurrying onward are both vertical forms within a vertical frame. But the trees are rooted in the arid landscape and are bleached to the colour of dry bones. Without the hooded women hurrying on, this landscape would be static and barren. The figures of the women give the image its element of uncertainty and urgency. The odd thing is that the women echo the vertical form of the petrified trees: this is disturbing because the dead, dry branches of the trees seem twisted permanently in agony." (Dilip Chitre, The Reasoning Vision: Jehangir Sabavala's Painterly Universe, New Delhi: Tata McGraw-Hill Publishing Company Limited, 1980, p. 66)

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