Important Notice

"I suddenly saw no reason to paint from any kind of concept at all. There came an amazing sense of liberation, and that is where my painting began to flow from." - V S GAITONDE

V S Gaitonde is renowned for his precise, deliberate technique, and much of his work is an extension of his independent-minded and private nature. He once said, "I could never stop painting, but even if I do stop, I will continue to talk about it.... "I suddenly saw no reason to paint from any kind of concept at all. There came an amazing sense of liberation, and that is where my painting began to flow from." - V S GAITONDE

V S Gaitonde is renowned for his precise, deliberate technique, and much of his work is an extension of his independent-minded and private nature. He once said, "I could never stop painting, but even if I do stop, I will continue to talk about it. Painting and Gaitonde are synonymous." (Artist quoted in Sandhini Poddar, V S Gaitonde: Painting as Process, Painting as Life, New York: The Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, 2014, p. 31)

Over the years, the artist's style transitioned and consolidated, but retained an unwavering consistency and quality. By the 1970s, when the present lot was painted, Gaitonde favoured the vertical format canvas upon which colours met textures in a seamless symphony, each distinct from the rest. Preferring the term "non-objective" rather than "abstract" to describe his work, the artist aspired to perfection, and this mastery of his art led him to become one of India's foremost modern painters. Inspired in various stages of his career by Basohli and Pahari miniatures, artists such as Paul Klee, and Zen Buddhism, he was "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)

NOT OF THIS WORLD
Gaitonde studied at the renowned Sir J J School of Art in Bombay, graduating successfully in 1948 and winning a fellowship for a further two years. It was a pivotal time in history - India was on the cusp of independence, and this was reflected in art, with most artists in Bombay rejecting the pedagogical British style and seeking a new vocabulary. A contemporary of the Progressive Artists' Group, Gaitonde was only loosely associated with them, and he exhibited in the first Bombay Group show. However, in his work, he 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." (Meera Menezes, Vasudeo Santu Gaitonde: Sonata of Solitude, Mumbai: Bodhana Arts and Research Foundation, 2016, p. 27)

By the late 1950s, Gaitonde had moved beyond the figurative genre popular at the time, favouring "geometrically rigid" compositions with lines, planes of colour and an often monochromatic palette, with a "subtle balancing of the image on canvas as if it were undulating on water and gradually surfacing in the light..." (Dnyaneshwar Nadkarni, Gaitonde, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, 1983) By 1959, he had moved exclusively to oil as a medium, applied with a roller and palette knife to layer, erase and add shapes and textures. Critic Sham Lal once said, Even in Gaitonde's abstract (sic) canvases, don't the large red or mauve or blue surfaces remind us in some vague way of the immensity of outer space, and the circles and squares which break up this surface of strange planets?" (Quoted in Nadkarni)

TAKING IT SLOW
In the 1960s, Gaitonde's interest in Zen Buddhism - which began in the previous decade - began to deepen. Influenced by the philosophical and spiritual teachings of J Krishnamurti and Ramana Maharshi, this preoccupation was the stepping-stone for Gaitonde's shift towards non-objectivism. "A turning point in his life came after his encounter with Zen Buddhism through the book Zen in the Art of Archery. His engagement with Zen also gave him a deeper understanding of nature and his early forays into the realm of abstraction were evocative of both sea and landscape." (Menezes, p. 27) Calligraphic, hieroglyphic forms also began to appear in his paintings, punctuating the largely monochromatic canvases and dramatising the play of light and colour. Additionally, in 1964, the artist was introduced to Abstract Expressionist artists such as Rothko while on a John D Rockefeller III fellowship in New York. The exposure to these new spiritual and artistic ways of thinking would find expression in Gaitonde's work in a unique way.

Gaitonde showed tremendous control over the canvas. Each painting emerged out of a process of deep and lengthy contemplation, and from the application of colour to the manner in which the forms emerged, every element was deliberate and balanced. He made only a handful of paintings in a year, spending months perfecting a single canvas, in reverence to and guided by the creative process.

From 1968 onwards, Gaitonde shifted from horizontal to vertical canvases, which he preferred almost exclusively through the rest of his career. During this period of transition, he created a series of works between 1968 and 1969 with hues similar to the present lot, which he later revisited but never identically repeated. In 1972, Gaitonde received the prestigious Padma Shri award from the Government of India in recognition of his contribution to and expertise in painting.

Around this time, he began experimenting with newspaper and magazine cut-outs, using a lengthy "lift-off" process to create such works, in which abstract shapes appear to linger on the surface. "The ensuing abstract forms hover across the surface, creating silhouetted shapes and geometries. In a work from 1973, he folded the newspapers into thin slivers in order to stencil horizontal, diagonal and vertical bands toward an overall symphonic field of quiet, abstracted geometry. These paintings have a gravity-defying weightlessness and yet there is a real sense of physicality and presence to them." (Poddar, p. 30)
.br.Gaitonde believed that his study of and engagement with Zen, as manifested in his paintings, distinguished them from those of his contemporaries and artistic movements prevalent at the time. They arose from a process of deep introspection and a harmony of form, colour, and thought; painting them was akin to a philosophical exercise rooted in quiet transformation. "The painter starts by absorbing these silences. You are not partial in the sense that no one part of you is working there. Your entire being is. Your entire being is working together with the brush, the painting knife, the canvas to absorb that silence and create." (Artist quoted in Poddar, p. 39)

FORM AND FEELING
In 1972, Gaitonde permanently moved from Mumbai to Delhi, leaving the buzzing city and its sea and rains behind forever. Ram Kumar said, "When he came from Bombay to Delhi he was always missing the sea, the Bombay way of life." (Quoted in Menezes, p. 165) Works such as the luminescent present lot recall the powerful element of water that Gaitonde associated with the place he had called home for much of his life. According to Richard Bartholomew, "Nature as the phenomenal environment - the mountains, the sea, mist, cloud, sunshine and the perspectives of the landscape, when recalled as experience, gets reflected in forms of feeling... In Gaitonde's work... the theme of the sea, the surf, the play of light, and the sea's mystique itself are orchestrated as music within the mind and expressed as a score or an organic fabric, a fine lace-work of melodic motifs." (Quoted in Poddar, p. 31)

Here, Gaitonde continues to draw from calligraphy to create enigmatic forms and motifs that appear to float and seek anchor..." - indecipherable, lurking just beneath the surface and beyond the reaches of consciousness. (Nadkarni) Progressing vertically across the canvas, the merging of symbols, textures and colours is almost meditative, reflecting the nature and process of its creator. As fellow artist Krishen Khanna said, "There is a strong correlation I see between the way Gaitonde thought, the way he lived, and the way he painted." (Poddar, p. 28) Gaitonde's ethereal canvases, including the present lot, encapsulated emotion through the medium of paint, and in their quiet intrigue and quest for perfection, they were an extension of the master artist himself.

"The canvas looks like an ocean; to carry the simile further, it is as if we are looking down on the mildly lapping waters of the sea near a pier and, in the half light, gazing at things surfacing or floating in the water... Many of Gaitonde's canvases possess that mystery, that tension between a translucent surface, and the motifs which lurk on the same canvas but from a distance." - DNYANESHWAR NADKARNI

LIVING WITH SOMETHING BEAUTIFUL
INTERVIEW WITH COLLECTOR SABIRA MERCHANT

"The decision to buy this green [Gaitonde] work was instantaneous. I just loved it so much, the construction and the colours of the painting, and I remember telling Kali Pundole at the time that it was very hard for us to afford it. Knowing me, he said 'No, I want you to have this painting and enjoy it, and you can pay me whenever you want,' and so it was paid for in installments." Sabira Merchant's unwavering recollection of this moment nearly 45 years ago reflects not only her relationship with art, but also her independent spirit of making things happen even if they didn't seem likely or conventional.

With a rich career that includes work in theatre, radio and television, Merchant credits her love for the arts to her architect father and painter mother, both of whom were also poets, "so the love of art just ran through me." She used to paint, experimenting with oil and charcoal, and she studied art in school and college. At the University of Neuchtel in Switzerland, she took a class where students had to regularly study and draw a nude life model. "I was a young girl, and I remember I was so nervous I could hardly put my pencil onto the paper and draw her. Of course, later on we got used to it." In the 1970s, when the disco revolution was yet to take hold in India, she converted a barber's shop at 29 Marine Drive into one of the most successful nightclubs in Bombay. Known as Studio 29, it doubled up during the day as a space for shows, plays and lectures, and was an area that gave itself over totally to entertainment of any and every kind."

In the early 1960s, when Merchant was married and a young mother of three, her love for theatre and art began to take centre stage. Her husband was confused at her sudden acting ambitions ("Why don't you play bridge instead?") but supported her when he realised that she was determined. She was cast in her first play, The Word, by Alyque and Pearl Padamsee, the "life- blood" of theatre, and received positive responses to her debut. It was also around this time that Merchant bought her first work of art, a "very unusual" piece by an artist named Mahesh Uppal. Comprising two copper and brass coins - replicas from the Gupta and Mughal periods respectively - embedded in a wooden board, "it had beautiful colourings of ochre and orange around it and the look of the piece just appealed to me so much. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, she went on to acquire works by K H Ara, Shanti Dave, M F Husain and V S Gaitonde, developing a preference for abstract modern works.She was also partial to sculptures, and Adi Davierwalla's large steel work, The Headless Warrior, is suspended between the two floors of her home.

Merchant counted many of these artists among her friends, with a relationship of support that went both ways; "they came to the theatre, I went to their exhibitions. Many were introduced through mutual friends, such as M F Husain and Jehangir Sabavala - who would later persuade her to buy his beautiful work, The Tenebrous Cloud, before he left for an exhibition in Scotland. These connections grew wider and deeper; her son went to preschool with Sabavala's daughter, and Husain's "inseparable" best friend Bal Chhabda lived in Merchant's building. She recalled numerous occasions when Husain would pull up in a taxi to visit him, sans shoes and cash, and encountering her in the lobby, left her to settle the fare. "He was a complete eccentric, artistic, focused-on-his-art human being."

Merchant also did a brief shoot with Husain for Doordarshan, part of which was filmed in her home. One frame that stayed in her mind involved the artist seated under his painting - a rare "white on white horses" work which she owned, and designed her living room around - holding his book titled Husain. "You could see the Husain book, you could see Husain holding it and you could see his painting above. It was a really classical shot."

She was close to the prolific Laxman Shrestha, who took up her idea of creating a triptych which she later bought in staggered payments; and a sculpture by Jehangir Jani - "a beautiful statue with rivets on it" - was actually inspired by a photograph in her home, a present from her husband on their 25th anniversary.

Merchant's journey as a collector was straightforward, even serendipitous, guided throughout by her aesthetic vision. "Nobody thought that art was going to be worth that much. You liked something, you liked the person, you liked his eccentricities... We never thought we were collecting. We just loved to look at it, and so we bought it. Just to see and admire and live with something beautiful."

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