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Lot 35

 

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This present lot, likely executed in the mid 1950s or early 1960s, just after Jagdish Swaminathan had decided to end his career as a political radical and become a full-time artist, represents the earliest phase of his celebrated body of work. It was during this period that the artist first turned to the symbology of ancient cave paintings and indigenous Indian art forms in an attempt to create a new language for modern Indian art, a quest that... This present lot, likely executed in the mid 1950s or early 1960s, just after Jagdish Swaminathan had decided to end his career as a political radical and become a full-time artist, represents the earliest phase of his celebrated body of work. It was during this period that the artist first turned to the symbology of ancient cave paintings and indigenous Indian art forms in an attempt to create a new language for modern Indian art, a quest that would animate his work throughout his life.

Writing about this initial period of his oeuvre, critic Geeta Kapur notes that Swaminathan's paintings "…drew upon the collective assemblage of myths and symbols in folk, and other subterranean passages of culture that attempted to reach the unknown in a kind of blind intuitiveness. The borrowed image held a certain amount of intrinsic power; the rest he wishes to infuse by the particular confluence of elements on the picture plane. The whole became a composition of non-descriptive, only partially associative images, combined with 'automatic writing', darkly painted upon dark surfaces, appearing as if they were being seen at the end of a dark passage in a temple" ("Reaching out to the part", Lalit Kala Contemporary 40, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, 1995, p. 17).

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