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Lot 38

 

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“My paintings are Indian in as much as they have been done by me; if they were to look like the frescoes of Ajanta I should have to obliterate from my memory all that I have seen-a feat which could be performed only by a freak or by a fraud. I am neither one, nor the other.” - AKBAR PADAMSEE

The present lot is a rare example of Akbar Padamsee’s earliest exploration of the human figure, a theme that would continually evolve... “My paintings are Indian in as much as they have been done by me; if they were to look like the frescoes of Ajanta I should have to obliterate from my memory all that I have seen-a feat which could be performed only by a freak or by a fraud. I am neither one, nor the other.” - AKBAR PADAMSEE

The present lot is a rare example of Akbar Padamsee’s earliest exploration of the human figure, a theme that would continually evolve throughout his oeuvre. Painted in 1952, a little over a year after he first arrived in Paris, it demonstrates the influences of his study of ancient Indian art and the international art movements he encountered when he moved to France, which he amalgamated into his own personal style.

As a student of the J J School of Art, Bombay, in the late 1940s, Padamsee was mentored by renowned painter and art teacher Shankar Palshikar who encouraged him to study the aesthetics of art alongside painting. He spent hours in the institution’s library where he learnt of various schools and artistic styles, studied Hindu iconography and the human form in the Shilpashastra, and read the Upanishads and the works of A K Coomaraswamy, Max Mueller, and Adi Shankaracharya. Upon graduating, he spent three months travelling around India, on Palshikar’s advice, and visited the Madras Museum and several South Indian temples, including the Meenakshi temple in Madurai and the Nataraja temple at Chidambaram in Tamil Nadu.

Shortly after this trip, Padamsee moved to Paris in 1950. There he absorbed himself in the avant garde art of the time, frequenting libraries, galleries, and museums, and made the acquaintance of artists such as Man Ray and Alberto Giacometti. His early works made during his stay in France thus contain diverse stylistic cues, including ancient Indian temple sculpture, traditional African art, and the works of European masters such as Georges Rouault, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Mattise.

The artist’s fascination with the human form crystallised during this period. Painted on isorel, the present lot represents his conception of contemporary Indian art, inspired by the canons of classical Indian statuary, that of the temples, whose forms he renews, breathing life into them by humanising them: their gazes absorbed in themselves; he hybridises budding branches with the arms of a woman painted in orange tones with gently voluptuous forms who, like a nymph, is metamorphosing and linked to the immemorial themes of nature, abundance and fertility. We can already sense the association he would make between a female nude and nature.

Though Padamsee’s figures usually appear to be of ambiguous origin, the present lot is a rare instance in which the subject displays a certain Indianness. Art historian Geeta Kapur observes that his “earliest figures (1951-52) are large and frontal, rather as one finds them in the primitive-archaic stages of a culture. The impression of “primitivism”-a self-consciously adopted attitude, not dissimilar to that which has prevailed in modern painting since Gauguin-is based on the explicit sexuality of the figures. The body is sensuously handled, and seems to be moulded out of a porous, yellow-ochre clay. The genitals of the figures, both male and female, are prominently displayed.” (Geeta Kapur, “Akbar Padamsee: The Other Side of Solitude,” Contemporary Indian Artists, New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House Pvt. Ltd, 1978, p. 100)

Bound by bold, dark lines, the subject of this painting is a solitary figure portrayed with a bland expression and rigid, iconic stance. Art historian Annapurna Garimella remarks, “Lone figures have allowed him the possibility for exploring the formal and existential meaning of space and the location of the human in it. Singular males or females appear to work on the canvas like architecture does to populate and perhaps accentuate the terrain. That is why his portraits, especially the early ones, endow a monumentality and ponderousness to the figures.” (Annapurna Garimella, “Re-situating Akbar Padamsee: A Sociology of Figuration,” Bhanumati Padamsee, Annapurna Garimella eds., Akbar Padamsee: Work in Language, Mumbai: Marg Publications in association with Pundole Art Gallery, 2010, p. 90)

The sculptural quality of the figure in the present work was likely borrowed from Padamsee’s contemporary, F N Souza, whose sensuous nudes referred to Indian temple sculptures, especially those of Khajuraho. However, “the differences in attitude, which were to become so striking within a couple of years, are discernible from the start. Akbar instinctively handles the sacred rather than the profane aspect of an image, whereas Souza has always done exactly the opposite, taking up explicitly religious subjects for the express purpose of committing sacrilege.” (Kapur, p. 101)

Though he had only recently graduated from art school, Padamsee witnessed the beginnings of a successful artistic career during his initial years in France. In 1952, the same year that the present lot was completed, he held his first group show alongside S H Raza and Souza at the Galerie Saint- Placide in Paris followed by two others, and was awarded third prize by Surrealist André Breton in a prestigious competition held by Journal d’Arte for a similar work titled Woman With Bird. The following year, he was invited to the Venice Biennale and showed with Galerie Raymond Creuze in Paris.

1952 also saw the beginning of a seminal series of figurative works titled Prophets, which points to the deep impact that primitive Indian art, particularly religious icons and sculptures, had on Padamsee’s early career. The artist’s figures underwent a transformation in the years that followed. As Geeta Kapur notes, by 1954, they began to lose their iconic, primitive Indian qualities and by 1955, they were “wholly human and, for that reason, wholly vulnerable. However, for that reason they did not lose their power of transmittance. The body was handled as though it were a sounding board for the spirit and the figures retained a profound quality of sentience; an aspect at once attentive and remote, intimate and monumental.” (Kapur, p. 102)

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