Important Notice

"A river collects to spill the potential turmoil of clouds above into spume below. This thrusts upwards with the force of its descent. Lateral lodes of dull purple, umber and rust are elemental mineral; their fracture softened by planar translucencies and liquid fluencies. A volatile element rips open a fissure in that which confines and defines it. Oppositions open and yield."

- Jehangir Sabavala


Jehangir... "A river collects to spill the potential turmoil of clouds above into spume below. This thrusts upwards with the force of its descent. Lateral lodes of dull purple, umber and rust are elemental mineral; their fracture softened by planar translucencies and liquid fluencies. A volatile element rips open a fissure in that which confines and defines it. Oppositions open and yield."

- Jehangir Sabavala


Jehangir Sabavala retains a distinct place among his fellow modernists as a classically trained artist who maintained a certain degree of restraint in his landscapes, seascapes and cityscapes, mostly done in oils.

Of Cliff and Fall - III belongs to a suite of paintings created by Sabavala in 1978. By the end of the 1970s, Sabavala had mastered the interplay of colour, texture and light, achieving a luminosity that appeared inherent in his landscapes. He layered wedges of colour that made light appear as if it "...slants, slides, stipples slopes and points up peaks. The witnessing glory of illumination plays a pivotal role: it identifies the edges of Sabavala's reveries of distance and longing; it plays a discreet game of chess with its Manichean rival, the creeping shadow, the gathering darkness." (Ranjit Hoskote, The Crucible of Painting: The Art of Jehangir Sabavala, Eminence Designs Pvt. Ltd., Mumbai, 2005, p. 133)

Sabavala's landscapes refer to sources which are diverse and sometimes far apart geographically as well as in his experience of them. The cliffs in the present lot appear to borrow from the landscape of the Western Ghats and Mahabaleshwar, as well as the Phaedriades in Delphi, Greece, which the artist recalls from a 1957 trip. The scene appears as if it has been pieced together like a puzzle: fractured planes of purple are interspersed irregularly with umbers and siennas. While Sabavala was precise in placing and levelling colour with his palette knife, he also segmented each part to create landscapes that were at once easily recognisable and distant. The cascading waterfall suggests both movement and stasis-the spume rising from the pool appears frozen, jutting out like a slab of crystal, or a stalagmite.

The present lot retains certain technical references to Sabavala's earlier work. Referring to Sabavala's 1974 Waterfall, a precursor to the present lot, Dilip Chitre notes: "Layer upon layer of brown-umber, sienna and ochre have been used to texture the surface and give an impression of granite solidity. The elemental force of water mesmerizes us by its sheer energy." (The Reasoning Vision: Jehangir Sabavala's Painterly Universe, Tata McGraw-Hill, New Delhi, 1980, p. 69).

Of Cliff and Fall-III is a key transitional work in Sabavala's constantly evolving style. Art critic Ranjit Hoskote notes: "The judicious use of deftly planed knife-edge impasto continues through the rust, umber and purple abysses in the 'Of Cliff and Fall' suite of 1978. Sabavala has obviously been consulting his sketchbook and colour notes: this vocabulary, part Delphic and part Deccan, has demonstrably evolved from the excoriated, mountainous verticals of 'The Flight into Egypt III' (1971) and will recur, softened and lyrical, in the 'Unbroken Wings' series of 1987." (Hoskote, p. 135)

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