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“My art, a mixture of academic, impressionist and cubist texture, form and colour, acquired a distinct style in the mid ‘60s. And with each step I have evolved a new experience. But if I look back, I find I have carried all the elements forward.” - JEHANGIR SABAVALA

Located between the real and the ideal, the land landscapes created by Jehangir Sabavala are mesmerising, intuitive, universal, and timeless. Paintings such as the... “My art, a mixture of academic, impressionist and cubist texture, form and colour, acquired a distinct style in the mid ‘60s. And with each step I have evolved a new experience. But if I look back, I find I have carried all the elements forward.” - JEHANGIR SABAVALA

Located between the real and the ideal, the land landscapes created by Jehangir Sabavala are mesmerising, intuitive, universal, and timeless. Paintings such as the present lot, that are inspired by scenes he encountered while travelling in India, show careful planning and are constructed with the help of meticulous outlines and highly nuanced colour planes. The final results are images of land, sea and sky that are unique in their restraint, while appearing emotionally charged.

Sabavala’s work is aesthetically sublime, as well as intrinsically laced with philosophical thought. Working often with oils, Sabavala preferred a quiet palette, with veiled light and middle-tones appealing to him more than pure colours and loud imagery, as is evident in the present lot.

As an artist practicing in the modernist style with a deeply ingrained classical influence, Sabavala created a unique artistic vocabulary that showed the influence of subtle Cubist forms. He created almost geometric wedges out of paint, which he put together to form vast, tranquil scenes. These give each canvas an illusory sense of depth, illustrating the artist’s mastery over light, colour, and texture. The interplay of light and shadow, in particular, is of great importance here. Sabavala uses his geometric wedges to help distribute the light across the canvas and to also make the viewer focus on specific areas of the painting. “Light does not simply fall, in these paintings; the light slants, slides, stipples, slopes, and points up peaks. The witnessing illumination plays a pivotal role: it identifies the edges of Sabavala’s dramas of distance and longing; it plays chess with its Manichean rival, the gathering darkness, the creeping shadow. Sudden disclosure, gradual realisation: the light in these paintings is unpredictable, plays tricks on the eyes. Most often, it seems to bear testimony to the fragility of life in a hostile terrain, the plangency of vision in an atmosphere frought with violence.” (Ranjit Hoskote, Recent Paintings: Jehangir Sabavala, Madras: Gallery Arts Trust, 1993)

A closer look at Flight of the Egrets I transports the viewer to its tranquil, sun-dappled environs to share in the artist’s experience of nature. Underlining the complexity of Sabavala’s handling of light and colour, evident in paintings like the present lot, painter and photographer Richard Lannoy notes, “The individual hues and tones, being mixed separately in subtly but cleanly differentiated gradations, impart to the picture surface a cleanliness and clarity of hue which is very unusual. [...] His mastery of light effects is based on a lifetime’s study of natural Indian light without resort to banal naturalism.” (Ranjit Hoskote, Pilgrim, Exile, Sorcerer: The Painterly Evolution of Jehangir Sabavala, Mumbai: Eminence Designs Pvt. Ltd., 1998, p. 16)

Dubbing his paintings of the early 2000s “occasions of light”, Ranjit Hoskote notes that Sabavala’s art “...derives its crucial tension from the dialectic between the actual and the idealised: his paintings come to life in the conceptual region between mutable terrain and timeless landscape, raw body and stylised figure, ephemeral flowers and eternal still life. The principal device by which Sabavala transmutes and idealises the forms of nature in his paintings is a crystalline geometry, which dissolves bodies, objects and topographies, and re-constitutes them as prismatic structures. Even the relatively abstractionist passages in Sabavala’s paintings are carefully modulated through this crystalline geometry; there is no leeway here for the haphazard gesture or the spontaneous pictorial effusion.” (Ranjit Hoskote, The Crucible of Painting: The Art of Jehangir Sabavala, Mumbai: Eminence Designs Pvt. Ltd., 2005, pp. 168, 176-77)

Painted in 2004 during the last few years of Sabavala’s life, the present lot sees the artist turning to the figure of the crane, a bird that has been used as a motif in several artistic traditions across the ages, to represent his commitment to beauty and grace despite the transitory nature of existence. Known as tsuru in Japan, cranes represent peace, longevity and good fortune, and link Sabavala’s artistic beliefs with ancient Asian philosophy. Hoskote elaborates, “These new paintings are possessed by an aesthetic that hints at the stance taken up by the Japanese mono no aware school: the belief that transience may well be our lot, but we ought to record that transience with elegance, memorialise beauty even as it falls to the predatory movements of time.” (Hoskote, p. 176)

The present lot is accompanied by a companion work from the same year titled Flight of the Egrets II (see reference image titled Flight of Cranes II, 2004). The set of two paintings appear “suffused with a light that emerges from within the canvas: a light that breaks the surface at the edges of the image, delineating body and topography, earth and flame, rock and sky as a single flow of faceted forms... Crystalline in structure, these forms interpenetrate... seem to change into one another before our eyes when we look at them closely.” (Hoskote, pp. 193, 196)

In Flight of the Egrets I, Sabavala “treats the flock of birds as though they were human figures about to land, nest and multiply. The landscape... is analysed and presented as a lattice structure crystallising the conflicting emphases of low hills, grasslands and a river together into a cogency of the eye. Commenting on his continuing love for mercurial colour as a means of tracking changes of scale within a painting, transiting from one detail to another, Sabavala observes: “I have always had a feeling for the ambient air, for cloud formations, as in Tiepolo’s skies. If you take away the church and the figures, what you have is a blaze of gorgeous aquamarines and ceruleans”.” (Hoskote, pp. 171, 176)

It is perhaps due to this that Sabavala’s art has earned him a distinguished place in modern Indian art, among peers, critics, and collectors alike. The art critic S V Vasudev once said: “There are a few artists who in the course of a generation of the contemporary movement in India, have made an indelible impression on the mind and have also revealed in their progress the nature of the artistic quest... Today Jehangir Sabavala’s paintings reveal the refinement of a poetic mind, the abstract sign posts of a philosophical search for values, the painterly technique realized after years of experience, and, above all, the singular note that keeps alive the wonder in creation.” (Pria Devi, Jehangir Sabavala, New Delhi: Lalit Kala Akademi, 1984)

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