Important Notice

"I like to think of the surface of my paintings as an archaeological site where you can uncover surface after surface. - AKBAR PADAMSEE

Akbar Padamsee's landscapes from the early 1960s are reminiscent of the French countryside, but transcend a specific location. Painted during a period when the artist had returned from Paris to Bombay and was transitioning between places and styles, the present lot depicts closely-packed houses... "I like to think of the surface of my paintings as an archaeological site where you can uncover surface after surface. - AKBAR PADAMSEE

Akbar Padamsee's landscapes from the early 1960s are reminiscent of the French countryside, but transcend a specific location. Painted during a period when the artist had returned from Paris to Bombay and was transitioning between places and styles, the present lot depicts closely-packed houses and buildings, underscoring the artist's interest in structure and architecture. According to literary critic and journalist Sham Lal, "It is always the composition of planes and colours which give form to what Padamsee has to say. This becomes all the more clear in his paintings of 1961 and 1962... It is not only the richer design of these paintings but their more mellow use of colour which distinguishes them from Padamsee's earlier work." ("Akbar Padamsee," Padamsee: Sadanga Series on Modern and Contemporary Indian Art, Mumbai: Vakils Publications, p. 8)

Padamsee abandons the use of perspective and instead places each structure above the other, building up the scene plane by plane. Executed using a palette knife, the structures take form through swatches of colour - umber, orange, beige and black, with a deep blue sky visible in the background. According to Beth Citron, in similar works of this period, "individual houses [were] reduced to opaque squares and triangles, even as the composite image would remain referential and legible as a landscape." ("Akbar Padamsee's Artistic 'Landscape' of the '60," Akbar Padamsee: Work in Language, Mumbai: Marg Publications and Pundole Art Gallery, 2010, p. 197)

The painting demonstrates Padamsee's rigorous and disciplined approach. "His method is quite contrary to that of the expressionists who use colour directly to express the turbulence or violence of their emotions without subjecting it to any discipline. In Padamsee's work colour is always subordinate to a structural basis. The texture of the paintings done in this period is by no means a superfluous detail; it is part of the meaning of the picture." (Sham Lal, p. 8)

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