Important Notice

French art critic Louis Vauxcelles first used the term ‘cubism’ or ‘bizarre cubiques’ after seeing one of Georges Braque’s paintings in 1908. The term now describes a style of painting, pioneered by Braque and Picasso, where three-dimensional objects are split into their component planes so that they are represented in their entirety on two-dimensional surfaces. The resulting images are geometric, lit from various angles and can be... French art critic Louis Vauxcelles first used the term ‘cubism’ or ‘bizarre cubiques’ after seeing one of Georges Braque’s paintings in 1908. The term now describes a style of painting, pioneered by Braque and Picasso, where three-dimensional objects are split into their component planes so that they are represented in their entirety on two-dimensional surfaces. The resulting images are geometric, lit from various angles and can be simultaneously visualized from a multitude of perspectives.

Jehangir Sabavala, who studied at the Academie Julian, Academie André Lhote and Academie de la Grande Chaumiere in Paris from 1947 to 1957, was deeply influenced by the cubist movement. Fusing its technical principles with his personal quest to capture the elusive spirituality that he believed animated humans and nature, the artist fashioned a unique vocabulary for himself, honing it to precision over the last half-century.

In this 2003 canvas, titled Dark Silhouettes, the Moon, the influence of cubism on Sabavala’s body of work is overwhelmingly apparent. The canvas’s surface has been broken up into multifaceted and clearly delineated areas of texture and paint, and the simplification of natural forms like the human body into cylinders, spheres and cones is immediately recognisable. Another distinctive characteristic of cubism is the shallow ambiguous space created when the background and object planes intersect. The lines in Sabavala’s painting interpenetrate with meticulous perfection, emphasizing the two-dimensionality of the canvas and also causing a deliberate association amongst the various elements that lie within.

“And so the relationship between the actual and the idealized, the terrestrial and the celestial, becomes symbolic of a relationship between human limitations and the possibilities of the infinite, in Sabavala’s paintings” (Ranjit Hoskote, The Crucible of Painting: The Art of Jehangir Sabavala, Eminence Designs Pvt. Ltd., Mumbai, 2005, p.193).

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