Important Notice

Born in Baroda in 1920, Sadanand Bakre was one of the founding members of the Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group alongside K H Ara, S H Raza, F N Souza, M F Husain and H A Gade. As a young boy, he helped his uncle retouch glass negatives at his photography studio in Nagpur and spent time watching sculptor Raghunath Phadke at work and crafted items from bits of clay that he discarded.

In 1939, Bakre joined the J J School of Art in Mumbai... Born in Baroda in 1920, Sadanand Bakre was one of the founding members of the Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group alongside K H Ara, S H Raza, F N Souza, M F Husain and H A Gade. As a young boy, he helped his uncle retouch glass negatives at his photography studio in Nagpur and spent time watching sculptor Raghunath Phadke at work and crafted items from bits of clay that he discarded.

In 1939, Bakre joined the J J School of Art in Mumbai where he formally trained as a sculptor and first became acquainted with modernism. His talent was nurtured by Charles Garrard, the then head of the institution, and Rudi von Leyden, Emmanuel Schlesinger and Wayne Hartwell who introduced him to modern art in Europe and America. His association with the Progressive Artists’ Group acted as a catalyst to his own work. He participated in their early shows and by the late 1940s, developed a style characterised by “free-flowing form and unconventional shapes”. (Yashodhara Dalmia, “The View from the Wings,” The Making of Modern Indian Art, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 190-191)

It was after arriving in London in 1951 that Bakre began painting on canvases. Though trained in academic realism, like many of his peers, the artist broke away from convention and favoured abstraction instead. He remarked, “I am traditionally trained and perfectly capable of accomplishing completely realistic work. But my interest in forms has gone far beyond the dull imitations of subject matter, which to me is almost unimportant.” (S K Bakre, “All Art is Either Good or Bad,” Free Press Bulletin, 24 March, 1965)

Bakre’s “work made its mark with its variegated style and distinctive vigour”. (Dalmia, p. 189). By 1959 his artistic vocabulary had evolved to feature spiky forms and sharp, angular geometric shapes. “It was with the earlier Vorticists, the most radical of the groups, with which both [Jacob] Epstein and the sculptor Gaudier-Brezeska were associated and who wanted to create a harsh, precise, and mechanistic art for the new age that Bakre felt a direct affinity…The Vorticists were known for their anti-realist character and they expressed the human figure and its surroundings in a jagged, rhythmical, and linear style verging on total abstraction.” (Dalmia, p. 195)

The artist’s paintings from this period appear as extensions of his sculptures. As seen in the present lot, their geometrical forms acquired two-dimensional shapes on his canvas. The jagged shapes protrude and suggest movement and yet are wedged together and constrained, lending tension to the work. “It was a geometrical, mathematical phase. I felt the need to do this from some unknown experience of balance,” explained the artist. (The artist in an interview with Yashodhara Dalmia, Murud, December 1992) Though he is best remembered for his works as a sculptor, an exploration of Bakre’s artistic career is incomplete without considering his paintings. Bakre was constantly driven to find a means to express himself. In his words, “I paint as I like. It is a compelling passion with me to keep alive and I cannot help painting or sculpting.” (Bakre, 24 March, 1965)

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