Important Notice

Krishen Khanna spent much of the 1950s in the unhurried contentment of the city of Madras (now Chennai) where he worked for Grindlays Bank. His stay here was marked by a developing interest in Carnatic music. This engagement was deepened by Narayana Menon, then the Director of All India Radio, who introduced him to personalities of note in Carnatic music like the legendary mridangam player Palghat Mani Iyer, his student Palghat Raghu,... Krishen Khanna spent much of the 1950s in the unhurried contentment of the city of Madras (now Chennai) where he worked for Grindlays Bank. His stay here was marked by a developing interest in Carnatic music. This engagement was deepened by Narayana Menon, then the Director of All India Radio, who introduced him to personalities of note in Carnatic music like the legendary mridangam player Palghat Mani Iyer, his student Palghat Raghu, flautist Mahalingam, violinist T N Krishnan, and the illustrious Bharatnatyam dancer Balasaraswathi. Menon also took Khanna to Carnatic concerts most weekday evenings, and connoisseur that he had become, Khanna would host musical gatherings at his home on the weekends where Mahalingam was a regular.

This deep engagement with music since shows up in his oeuvre where musicians have been featured often over the years. The present lot is an early work painted in 1967, a period when M F Husain notes Khanna to be working with “tremendous energy and stamina well controlled.” (“Art and Activism”, Gayatri Sinha, Krishen Khanna: A Critical Biography, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 2001, p. 101) In this “rapid gestural work”, the figure of a sitar player partially emerges from expressive strokes of brown, white, and ochre. The brushwork suggests a kineticism which, art critic Gayatri Sinha states, emulates the pacing of Carnatic music. “He sought with his brush to bring to the act of painting the dextrous speed of the music. He was intrigued by the informal manner in which a raga began and then entered a formal structure. His attempt was to transform the creation of rhythmic sound in time, into the movement of brush in space, on canvas.” (“Raga in Ragtime”, Sinha, 2001, p. 48)

Though figuration dominates his oeuvre, he experimented extensively with abstraction across mediums in the 1960s, the decade this lot was painted in. The influence of abstract art on the artist can be traced to his association with the Progressive Artists’ Group whose members were looking for new pictorial languages in which to express themselves. “A dominant influence on Indian modernists was their reading of Bloomsbury critics like Roger Fry and Clive Bell whose Art (1914) introduced the concept of aesthetics as a ‘significant form’. Bell wrote about a unique aesthetic emotion or appreciation of an object that is irrespective of what else the object may signify, describing it as a ‘significant form’, a concept that strongly influenced Khanna’s early abstract work.” (Gayatri Sinha, Krishen Khanna: The Embrace of Love, Ahmedabad: Mapin Publishing, 2005, p. 9) Giving into the sensuousness of oil, Krishen Khanna creates form through his brushwork in a potent, evocative work of art.

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