Important Notice

Shortly after their wedding in 1955, Jagdish Swaminathan and his wife spent their honeymoon in Betul, Madhya Pradesh, where his encounter with tribal folk left a lasting impression on his artistic vision. He witnessed a young village boy being revived by a witch doctor after having been bitten by a snake-an experience that moved him. Recalling the incident he wrote, “We watched in rapt fascination and soon enough the boy recovered and the snake,... Shortly after their wedding in 1955, Jagdish Swaminathan and his wife spent their honeymoon in Betul, Madhya Pradesh, where his encounter with tribal folk left a lasting impression on his artistic vision. He witnessed a young village boy being revived by a witch doctor after having been bitten by a snake-an experience that moved him. Recalling the incident he wrote, “We watched in rapt fascination and soon enough the boy recovered and the snake, which had been imprisoned in an earthen pot, was let off and disappeared into a thick bamboo grove. This early encounter with tribal life was to have a deep impact on my later life.” (Jagdish Swaminathan, “The Cygan: An Auto-Bio Note”, Jagdish Swaminathan, Geeta Kapur, Gieve Patel et al, Lalit Kala Contemporary 40, New Delhi: Lalit Kala Akademi, 1995, p. 9)

From the very beginning of his artistic career, Swaminathan challenged both the revivalist ideals of the Bengal School as well as the notion that modernism in India was solely influenced by the West. Instead, he sought to forge a truly Indian modernism that bridged contemporary art and the country’s own folk and indigenous art traditions. This philosophy went on to shape his work of the early 1960s when he developed a distinctive artistic idiom that was derived from the symbology of ancient cave paintings, totemic symbols from early societies, and indigenous Indian art forms.

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.” (Geeta Kapur, “Reaching Out to the Part”, Jagdish Swaminathan, Geeta Kapur, Gieve Patel et al, Lalit Kala Contemporary 40, New Delhi: Lalit Kala Akademi, 1995, p. 17)

Although Swaminathan eventually became widely recognised for his Bird, Mountain, Tree series, he returned to and refined his earlier engagement with tribal and folk art in the 1980s. His “natural bent for the primeval” was rekindled through renewed contact with tribal communities while setting up the Roopanker Museum of Art at Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal, at the invitation of the Madhya Pradesh government. According to him, this was a “new phase recalling my work of the early sixties. If my work of the early sixties anticipated the journey of the eighties, my present phase recapitulates my beginnings.” (Swaminathan, p. 13)

Painted just a year before his passing, works such as the present lot embody this renewed exploration of indigenous art, reinforcing his conviction that the philosophical foundations of traditional Indian art belong within contemporary artistic discourse. The deliberately unstructured yet deeply intuitive manner in which Swaminathan arranges his forms and symbols mirrors the organic approach found in tribal art. Artist Krishen Khanna has remarked, “The stream of paintings which gushed out uninterrupted bore no resemblance to the preceding phase but were related to the paintings executed in the fifties and early sixties when he had employed symbols with known connotations. Significantly, the paintings of the last phase of his life were concerned with the passage of a sign on its way to becoming a symbol. A symbol by its very nature is a means of communication sometimes of very complex ideas and it assumes a commonality of understanding between the maker and the receiver. In the case of Swami’s paintings the marks made with intentions and equally those which just happened to get there by virtue of the process, do not create symbols in the sense I have mentioned, but the completed painting is itself symbolic of the act of painting itself.” (Krishen Khanna, J. Swaminathan - Contemporary Indian Art Series, New Delhi: Lalit Kala Akademi, p. 4)

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