Important Notice

"There is a kind of metamorphosis in every canvas, and the metamorphosis never ends." - V S GAITONDE

Vasudeo Santu Gaitonde has always stood apart from his contemporaries, whether in his personality, which demanded isolation, or in his aesthetic vision that increasingly exhibited a strong sense of meditative introspection. From his modest beginnings, and against all odds, he pursued an enigmatic quest toward abstraction, and... "There is a kind of metamorphosis in every canvas, and the metamorphosis never ends." - V S GAITONDE

Vasudeo Santu Gaitonde has always stood apart from his contemporaries, whether in his personality, which demanded isolation, or in his aesthetic vision that increasingly exhibited a strong sense of meditative introspection. From his modest beginnings, and against all odds, he pursued an enigmatic quest toward abstraction, and is today regarded as one of the most formidable artists not only in India, but on the world art stage. In an interview, fellow artist Krishen Khanna stated, "There is a strong correlation I see between the way Gaitonde thought, the way he lived, and the way he painted." (Sandhini Poddar, V S Gaitonde: Painting as Process, Painting as Life, New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2014, p. 28) Gaitonde's ethereal canvases, including the present lot, exude the grand silences he alluded to when describing the act of painting.

Growing up in the Girgaon area of Mumbai, Gaitonde graduated from the J J School of Art in 1948. "Gaitonde's formal initiation into the fine arts came at a momentous time, for India stood on the brink of independence, poised to throw off the yoke of British colonialism. The curriculum at the arts college largely followed the same pattern as the Royal Academy in London." (Meera Menezes, Vasudeo Santu Gaitonde: Sonata of Solitude, Mumbai: Bodhana Arts and Research Foundation, 2016, p. 48) Gaitonde, however, influenced by mentors like Shankar Palshikar and Jagannath Ahiwasi, also studied Indian miniatures. In his early works, he would adopt the bold colours and fine lines of the Basohli and Jain schools of painting. In the decade that followed, Gaitonde experimented with various forms of figurations, space and abstraction, and eventually gravitated towards Western Modernism, particularly works by Paul Klee. The latter's whimsical forms and colours opened up a new language of expression for Gaitonde.

In the early 1950s, Gaitonde was loosely associated with the influential Bombay Progressive Artists' Group, invited by M F Husain, and later the Bombay Group. Even in these collectives, Gaitonde charted his own course, "consciously choosing not to pay banal homage to the social and political causes of the time. The social relevance of art was of no particular interest to him, Gaitonde's kingdom was not of this world. Abstraction, with its emphasis on the autonomy of the aesthetic, liberated him from depicting matters temporal, and he was highly conscious of its emancipatory potential. He chose to focus instead on light and line, texture and tactility, opacity and translucence and on the evocative possibilities of colour." (Menezes, p. 27)

In 1957, Gaitonde broke away from all forms of figuration, choosing a "non-objective" mode of expression, and instead he embarked on a journey "that would take him from form to formlessness, from essaying an outward reality to conducting a deep search within." (Menezes, p. 98) This was further augmented by his choice of monochromatic colour palettes, which he achieved almost exclusively through the use of rollers and palette knives, instead of brushes. The results of this stage of experimentation-accompanied by calligraphic strokes and hieroglyphs in ink-were by and large an extension of his personal engagement with Zen Buddhist philosophy. In 1964, Gaitonde was granted the John D Rockefeller III fellowship to live and work in New York, where he encountered Mark Rothko, one of America's foremost Abstract Expressionists. This trip furthered Gaitonde's experimentation with abstraction. Architect and friend of Gaitonde, Narendra Dengle writes, "There was no background on which something was painted but the entire work appeared like a dance of colours on canvas." (Narendra Dengle, "Gaitonde: The Spirit of his Painting," Journal of Landscape Architecture, No. 44, New Delhi: LA, Journal of Landscape Architecture, June 2015, p. 99) In 1968, he made a radical shift from his early horizontal canvases to a vertical format, which he retained through the rest of his career, as seen in works such as the present lot.

Gaitonde achieved several accolades in his time. In 1972, he received the highly prestigious Padma Shri award from the Government of India, and permanently moved to New Delhi. Around this time, he also began experimenting with newspaper and magazine cut-outs, by applying colour to the back of the scraps of paper, transferring it onto the canvas using rollers and subsequently erasing those parts with palette knives. The resulting effect created abstract shapes that appear to linger on the surface, much like the geometric forms seen in the present lot.

In this 1973 painting, Gaitonde creates a fiery orange surface, interspersed by dark horizontal bands that appear palpably dynamic - an effect possibly achieved through his unique "lift-off" process, as Poddar terms it. Two yellow orbs punctuate the painting in the middle, while a larger dark circle emerges from the lower half. Through this delicate balance between colour, space, light and texture in the present lot, Gaitonde conjures a deeply spiritual world that evokes associations with nature and philosophy. "These paintings have a gravity-defying weightlessness and yet there is a real sense of physicality and presence to them. Gaitonde believed fully in his vocation of artist, and in painting as such... There is an exactitude at work here..." (Poddar, p. 30)

Gaitonde's process of perfecting such works was a lengthy one. Throughout the year, he only made a handful of paintings, spending months working on a single canvas. "This emphasis on the creative process, the artist's masterful handling of color, structure, texture, and light, and his intuitive understanding of how these forces come together to alter one's perception are testament to his unwavering commitment to his craft." (Poddar, p. 30)

The New York Times art critic Holland Cotter has referred to Gaitonde as "a 20th century Indian modernist who looked westward, eastward, homeward and inward to create an intensely personalized version of transculturalism, one that has given him mythic stature in his own country and pushed him to the top of the auction charts." (Holland Cotter, "An Indian Modernist With a Global Gaze," The New York Times, 1 January 2015, online) Gaitonde's uniquely personal vision transcends cultural boundaries and has contributed to his universal appeal among art connoisseurs across the world.

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