Important Notice

“All great work is characterized by its aloneness”

The early 1950s were a period of intense study for Akbar Padamsee. Living in a small garret room in a Paris hotel, he was exposed not only to the city’s thriving art scene, personally interacting with artists like Alberto Giacometti, but also to other genres of art in the city’s many museums, and to various strains of philosophical thought in its cafes and libraries.

While... “All great work is characterized by its aloneness”

The early 1950s were a period of intense study for Akbar Padamsee. Living in a small garret room in a Paris hotel, he was exposed not only to the city’s thriving art scene, personally interacting with artists like Alberto Giacometti, but also to other genres of art in the city’s many museums, and to various strains of philosophical thought in its cafes and libraries.

While his figurative works from the period illuminate the way in which Padamsee absorbed and distilled these stimuli in his early practice, it is in his landscapes from the early 1950s that the raison d’être of his art, his quest for ‘aloneness’, is completely realized. “His landscapes of this period were distinctly idealized…Most of them were cityscapes, though seldom situated within a recognizable time or place. A sealed hermitage somewhere perhaps, or a holy city of medieval times, illuminated by a golden light. There was nothing familiar or habitable about them. Although one could spot, here and there, steeples, cupolas, and chimneys, there were no doors and windows to the buildings, no signs of life. This degree of idealization – one that he never applies to the human figure – made these cityscapes enchanting but at the same time strictly circumscribed” (Geeta Kapur, “Akbar Padamsee: The Other Side of Solitude”, Contemporary Indian Artists, Vikas Publishing House, New Delhi, 1978, p. 95).

In the present lot, one of the first landscapes that Padamsee painted, a single tree and a compact, unwelcoming group of turreted houses stand isolated in the shadow of a large hill on the distinct horizon. The moon, with its disconcerting aura, illuminates one side of the frame, leaving the manmade structures in shadow. Like the faceted hill, each form is delineated with the thick black outline that characterized all of Padamsee’s early works.

According to Shamlal, Padamsee’s earliest biographer, the ordered solitude of these works leaves no space for the maudlin or emotional. “In his first landscapes as in his first faces Padamsee cuts out the sentimental. What marks these canvases which he painted in 1953 is a simple order in which everything that smacks of the romantic is cut out. The moon which shines of the church steeples in one of these paintings is not the kind which makes young lovers swoon but one which reveals to them the frailty and ambiguity of their love. Again, though there is a perfect balance in the arrangement of trees in the landscape…there is nothing pretty about it. It has rather a starkness which without being drab makes one think of the essential loneliness of man” (Padamsee, Sadanga Series, Vakils, Bombay, 1964, p. 6, 7).

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