Important Notice

In his search for an artistic expression, Jamini Roy delved into his roots, often incorporating elements from traditional art forms such as Kalighat patuas and Bankura paintings in his works. His paintings primarily feature characters, often from Indian mythology, rendered in a limited range of flat, earthy colours and decisive lines. The present lot depicts a dancer, perhaps a gopini, in a sculptural tribhanga pose. Despite... In his search for an artistic expression, Jamini Roy delved into his roots, often incorporating elements from traditional art forms such as Kalighat patuas and Bankura paintings in his works. His paintings primarily feature characters, often from Indian mythology, rendered in a limited range of flat, earthy colours and decisive lines. The present lot depicts a dancer, perhaps a gopini, in a sculptural tribhanga pose. Despite its simplicity, details such as her costume, accessories and the red alta on her hands and feet are carefully accentuated. "Jamini Roy's images of Bengali women, at once voluptuous and demure, displaying the altapainted hands and feet of domestic duty, have become the most iconic of Roys. With their graceful gestures, they came, in troubled times, to represent familiarity. This inimitable image of the Bengali woman became a universal icon for Calcutta's middle classes and it was this iconography that fed the nostalgia of the Bengali bhadralok." (Sona Datta, Urban Patua: The Art of Jamini Roy, Mumbai: Marg Publications, 2010, p. 26)

The influence of folk art in Roy's work was deeper than borrowing merely stylistic or structural elements, and involved adapting and reforming the themes, usually through several versions of the same work created over a long period of time. According to Manasij Majumdar, Roy "often preferred to make images with bare minimal content and a rich formalist handling. Even when he treated a motif comprising two or more figures, he always eschewed all inessential representational details to move towards extreme simplification of the basic form, defined by smooth easy curved brush strokes most often in black or dark Indian red... Their expressiveness lies not in any subtle, complex or elaborate thematic statement but in their rigorous simplicity, scrupulous elimination of naturalism and simple myth-like evocativeness." (Manasij Majumdar, "Jamini Roy - Modernism's Nationalist Face," Jamini Roy: National Art Treasure, Kolkata: Purba, 2015, p. 55)

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