Important Notice

By the late 1960s, N.S. Bendre had developed a unique artistic vocabulary that blended traditional representative art with its non-objective counterpart. Having travelled extensively in India and abroad, Ram Chatterjee notes that the artist had become "…conscious of aspects beyond his immediate experience, of total perception in which his mind or emotion played a significant part…He studied the tenets of cubism and became aware of the... By the late 1960s, N.S. Bendre had developed a unique artistic vocabulary that blended traditional representative art with its non-objective counterpart. Having travelled extensively in India and abroad, Ram Chatterjee notes that the artist had become "…conscious of aspects beyond his immediate experience, of total perception in which his mind or emotion played a significant part…He studied the tenets of cubism and became aware of the significance of known aspects of an object, not merely the seen ones. He became aware of the images store in his mind, their context and their total environment - of all the elements that build up the total pictorial structure in a given space" (Bendre: The Painter and the Person, The Bendre Foundation for Art and Culture & Indus Corporation, Toronto, 1990, p. 59, 60).

As the artist once explained, "…all great works of art have abstract considerations at the root of the process, like establishing aesthetically desirable relationships of parts with the whole" ("My Painting", Ibid., p. 64).

The present lot, a portrait of a female musician executed in 1974, is a good example of the semi-abstract idiom that Bendre turned to in his quest to express his visual experiences in their entirety. Here, the musician's form is largely undefined, save for a few drapes of the sari she wears and her hands that hold and coax the notes from her instrument. As she plays, Bendre filters out all those details irrelevant to his experience of joy in the moment and the music. These superfluous details, including perspective and surroundings, recede almost completely into the muted and monochromatic ground.

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