Important Notice

Jehangir Sabavala’s works are gentle and mellifluous in form. Having begun with an impressionistic style, he quickly went on to imbibe the principles of Cubism. A fusion of his learnings is reflected in his works from the late 1950s through the mid-1960s, which developed into his signature style.

Following his training with Andre Lhote from 1947 to 1951 at the eponymously named academy in Paris, Sabavala imbibed the Cubist principles... Jehangir Sabavala’s works are gentle and mellifluous in form. Having begun with an impressionistic style, he quickly went on to imbibe the principles of Cubism. A fusion of his learnings is reflected in his works from the late 1950s through the mid-1960s, which developed into his signature style.

Following his training with Andre Lhote from 1947 to 1951 at the eponymously named academy in Paris, Sabavala imbibed the Cubist principles of constructing objects not as they appeared to the eye, but through their “relations to other objects” (Ranjit Hoskote, “Apprentice to a Tradition”, The Crucible of Painting: The Art of Jehangir Sabavala, Eminence Designs Pvt. Ltd., Mumbai, 2005, p47). Lhote “was the first in a troika of figures whom Sabavala regards as having vitally influenced the course of his development as a painter” (Ibid, p49). The transition from Impressionism to Cubism was a crucial period for Sabavala. While his early 50s works lean more towards his Impressionist learnings from the Academie Julian in Paris, his Cubist indoctrinations manifest quite effortlessly only in the latter half of that decade. He “set himself the arduous task of tempering his Impressionistic vivacity to the razor-sharp angles and planes of Cubism.” (Ibid., p51) In subsequent works, he developed the principles he had learnt into his own stylistic idiom.

Titled “The Bundi Courtyard”, this oil on canvas appears to be from the late 1950s. Sabavala prepared conceptual sketches for this work in 1956. Geometrical compositions and angular planes add a unique visual dimension to this courtyard scene in Bundi, Rajasthan. This is probably the result of a Cezannian approach to Cubism— the scene is constructed from geometric shapes, an artistic desire to “balance between the retinal doubt of perception and the ideal certainty of conception, and to generate the image from the confused impressions of the senses, the relativism of perspective, the multiple programmes of the mind.” (“Adventures in Sensation”, Ibid, p86). Doing away with superfluous detailing and focussing instead on the huddled forms, their poses and gestures, “The Bundi Courtyard” stays suspended in space and time, slightly distorted, as if broken first and then pieced together.

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