Important Notice

Lot 80

 

Quick Zoom

In the manifesto that he wrote for the short-lived artists’ collective, Group 1890, Jagdish Swaminathan called for a return to the representation of nature and its phenomena in their ‘virginal state’. This was a marked deviation from the romanticism of the Bengal School and the mannerism of modern European art, especially the Paris School. For Swaminathan, the "…significant issue was how to free the self, the individual artist, from the ‘clammy... In the manifesto that he wrote for the short-lived artists’ collective, Group 1890, Jagdish Swaminathan called for a return to the representation of nature and its phenomena in their ‘virginal state’. This was a marked deviation from the romanticism of the Bengal School and the mannerism of modern European art, especially the Paris School. For Swaminathan, the "…significant issue was how to free the self, the individual artist, from the ‘clammy embrace of the senses and rise to something a little more conceptually dignified’? Moving away from this self-referentiality (especially the pre-independence artistic conventions) Swaminathan argued for representation of the so far unrepresentatble with a desire to perhaps circle it with full blooded philosophical modernism – a theoretical proposition supported by a body of work which would then project its own referent marks leaving no trace of external determinations so that art as pure sublime will cause its own origin and death" (Amit Mukhopadhyay, "Editorial", Lalit Kala Contemporary 40, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, 1995, p. 4).

An attempt at this simple and clean representation is what we see in the present lot, one of the conceptual landscapes from the Bird, Tree and Mountain series that the artist began in 1968. Symbolic of an ascent out of the sullied world of the man-made into a more tranquil existence, this work also stands for a movement away from the Western ideals that, in Swaminathan’s opinion, dominated modern Indian art. It is not surprising, then, that the formal qualities of Pahari miniature paintings can be recognized in the clean composition of this piece, the fine detailing of the rocks and mountains, the flat expanses of saturated colour, and the simple white bands that contain these elements at the upper and lower edges.

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