Important Notice

“A critic once asked me, ‘Why are you drawn only by literary references?’ The fact is that I am madly interested in poetry.”
- KRISHEN KHANNA

Krishen Khanna often draws from literary sources. His works dealing with Christ and the Mahabharata stem from the Bible and ancient Hindu epics. The artist has nursed a love for poetry, especially post-war Western modernism, all his life and holds poets like W H Auden and T S Eliot in high... “A critic once asked me, ‘Why are you drawn only by literary references?’ The fact is that I am madly interested in poetry.”
- KRISHEN KHANNA

Krishen Khanna often draws from literary sources. His works dealing with Christ and the Mahabharata stem from the Bible and ancient Hindu epics. The artist has nursed a love for poetry, especially post-war Western modernism, all his life and holds poets like W H Auden and T S Eliot in high esteem. His profound love of the form is behind his impulse to translate the verbal into a visual medium. As he says, “At one time I was very mindful of keeping painting within its own realm of plastic reality... My passion for poetry would not allow such purity. Literary images and lines would insist on taking form in drawings and paintings.” (Artist quoted in Gayatri Sinha, Krishen Khanna: A Critical Biography, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 2001, pp. 110-112)

The present lot is one of a series of works inspired by German playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht’s poem about the murder of Marxist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg. Khanna’s devotion to Brecht led him to make a pilgrimage to Brecht Archives and many other similar institutions in Germany. He was greatly affected on first reading the poem in a volume borrowed from theatre director and gallerist Ebrahim Alkazi. Sensing the potential to translate the poignancy of the poem into an image and preoccupied with the figure of a drowning girl, Khanna created a series of works based on a carefully chosen English translation of the poem. The artist zeroed in on this version for its mention of a sympathetic sky. The present lot is painted with a serene palette dominated by blues and greens, with the light blue sky offering consolation to the victim. Khanna sticks to a minimal colour scheme with the pictorial arrangement depending largely on draughtsmanship. The figure is nearly disintegrated into the background by the spare colouration. The dissolution of the subject creates an almost spectral presence. In his words, “As time went on my structure loosened, the image would become nebulous, almost disappear, then reappear as if conjuring up a ghost.” (Artist quoted in Sinha, p. 116)

Khanna’s spare formal arrangements of the 1970s were a bid to express the dehumanisation experienced under capitalism according to critic Gayatri Sinha. That capitalism bleeds life of colour and vitality was the predominant belief of a people who had endured multiple wars and instability in the preceding years. Here, the girl’s loss of subjectivity can also be read as a reference to Luxemburg’s death: the Prussian Army threw her body in the water to deny her dignity in death. Krishen Khanna’s sympathy with the persecuted is reflected in his oeuvre’s long-standing concern with “the enduring biblical issues of justice and morality.” (Sinha, pp. 56-57) He believes his work cannot be isolated from the conditions the artist observes around him. “Painters do speak out their minds… I can’t divide my political feelings and my other feelings from painting itself, there is a link.” (Artist quoted in Sinha, pp. 165-166)

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