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Lot 72

In the manifesto that he wrote for the short-lived artists’ collective, ‘Group 1890’, Jagdish Swaminathan called for a return to the representation of nature and its phenomena in their ‘virginal state’. This was a marked deviation from the romanticism of the Bengal School and the mannerism of modern European art, especially the Paris School. An attempt at this simple and clean representation is what we see in this work, one of the conceptual... In the manifesto that he wrote for the short-lived artists’ collective, ‘Group 1890’, Jagdish Swaminathan called for a return to the representation of nature and its phenomena in their ‘virginal state’. This was a marked deviation from the romanticism of the Bengal School and the mannerism of modern European art, especially the Paris School. An attempt at this simple and clean representation is what we see in this work, one of the conceptual landscapes from the famous Bird, Tree and Mountain series that he began in 1968. As the artist explains, “In contradiction to the Western approach, the traditional Indian approach to painting-space has always been geometric. This, because painting was never meant to represent reality in the naturalistic, objective sense, it was the cogent and poetic rendering of an ideal truth in terms of two-dimensional space…The reincarnation of the numinous image will retrieve world painting from the rut of the analytical blind alley, and its palpable presence will remove painting from the realm of drawing room decoration to its fundamental icon-function.” (J. Swaminathan quoted in exhibition catalogue The Margi & the Desi: Between Tradition and Modernity, Gallery Espace, New Delhi, 2004)

Symbolic of an ascent out of the sullied world of the man-made into a more tranquil existence, this work also stands for a movement away from the Western ideals that, in Swaminathan’s opinion, dominated modern Indian art. It is not surprising, then, that the formal qualities of Pahari miniature paintings can be recognized in the clean composition of this piece, the fine detailing of the mountains, rocks and tree, the flat expanses of bright color, and the simple white bands that contain these elements. Though the palette is different, the compositional symmetry that is evident in this work harks back to his earlier series, Color Geometry of Space, where Swaminathan calculatedly placed small objects in large planes of color.

Also underlying this painting is the artist’s spirituality and deep respect for nature as the guide to a universe whose potential remains unrealized or hidden by Maya-Jaal or the web of worldly concerns. The canvas, then, is a metaphor of this condition, and its composition becomes a pictorial map, designed to help viewers understand it, uncloud their vision, and embrace existence in its entirety as it was meant to be.

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