Important Notice

"Grey is without prejudice. It does not discriminate between object and space."
- Akbar Padamsee

In 1959, Akbar Padamsee moved from Paris to Mumbai and worked from his new home in Juhu, creating a small group of "Grey Works." In 1960, Gallery 59 owner Bal Chhabda organised a solo exhibition of these grey paintings at the Jehangir Art Gallery in Mumbai. Padamsee received glowing reviews from leading art critics,... "Grey is without prejudice. It does not discriminate between object and space."
- Akbar Padamsee

In 1959, Akbar Padamsee moved from Paris to Mumbai and worked from his new home in Juhu, creating a small group of "Grey Works." In 1960, Gallery 59 owner Bal Chhabda organised a solo exhibition of these grey paintings at the Jehangir Art Gallery in Mumbai. Padamsee received glowing reviews from leading art critics, artists and collectors of the time. An article titled "Padamsee's Return" in The Link read, "Last week, with an exhibition of 12 oils sponsored by Bal Chabda [sic] of Gallery 59, he [Padamsee] has staged a comeback with a bang. Here are some monumental paintings the like of which has not been seen in Bombay hitherto. Except one, all are painted in blacks, greys and white... The nudes and the head studies have a terrific impact on the onlooker. So do the city landscapes made up of roofs, arranged with infinite care... Padamsee has established himself as a major painter with an individual vision and an ecriture all his own, with nothing borrowed from anybody and with something many may like to borrow and copy." (Staff reporter, "Padamsee's Return," The Link, 10 April 1960, p. 39) By the late 1950s, Padamsee had already gained recognition as an artist of international repute, participating in the Venice Biennale in 1953, and the Tokyo Biennale and Sao Paulo Biennale in 1959. The Grey Works firmly established him as one of India's masters.

Four paintings from the group of twelve canvases-Greek Landscape, Reclining Nude, Juhu, and Cityscape-were large, especially striking works. Greek Landscape, an extraordinary work of monumental scale, with a panoramic view of a city, attracted particular attention. With an architect's eye, Padamsee constructs a city of buildings on an undulating terrain using different intensities of grey. In the Sadanga Series on the artist published in 1964, literary critic Sham Lal writes, "By restricting himself to greys, like the Chinese masters who confine themselves to the various shades of black, he strikes the richest vein of poetry in his art. In the paintings of 1959 and 1960 there is a lyrical intensity which comes from a passionate love affair. The affair is between the artist and his art." (Shamlal, Akbar Padamsee, Mumbai: Sadanga Series by Vakils, 1964, p. 7) Padamsee experimented with shades of grey corresponding to particular colours until he arrived at the desired intensity. In her essay "Shades of Grey," Saryu Doshi elucidates further: "He discovered that certain greys appear to tune with blue, others with green, and he decided to substitute those particular greys for the blues and greens in his compositions. In this way he succeeded in expanding his chromatic range and giving it resonance... His grey palette now ranged from the soft, pale, lustrous greys of silks and satins to the deep, dark, ominous greys of the monsoon skies." (Bhanumati Padamsee and Annapurna Garimella eds., Akbar Padamsee: Work in Language, Mumbai: Marg Publications and Pundole Art Gallery, 2010, p. 180) The skilful adaptation of varying intensities of grey demonstrates his mastery over light, texture and tonal variations, making Greek Landscape all the more remarkable in its austerity.

Doshi writes of Greek Landscape as one of two "spectacular cityscapes depicting broad panoramic views of imaginary cities... Greek Landscape (pages 292-93, figure 2) belies its appellation because it, too, is wrought out of the artist's imagination. However, its architectural and topographical specificities do suggest a Mediterranean locale. The most striking feature of the painting is its audacious composition which encompasses the city in a wide, cursive sweep. The city itself, a dense aggregation of a multiplicity of forms, has, over time, spread from its central square to the neighbouring hills. The faceted fabric of the city imparts a sculptural dimension to the cityscape. The lucid interaction between solids and voids in the composition reveals the artist's command over handling space-a skill he acquired when learning to sculpt during his student days at the art school in Bombay." (Padamsee and Garimella eds., pp. 183, 186)

The art critic for The Times of India termed Padamsee 'The Painter's Painter' and wrote, "Nothing illustrates his growth to vigorous adulthood more than Padamsee's one-man show which opened at the Jehangir Art Gallery on Wednesday. There are but 12 oils on view, but so overpowering is their size-ranging as they do from canvases 10 feet by 3 feet to one enormous composition about 17 feet by 6 feet-and so outstanding is their quality that even the normally reticent observer will be deeply moved... all the paintings are in blacks, greys and whites. Basically cubistic in feeling they incorporate a degree of naturalism which is somewhat rare in a man of Padamsee's austere temperament. Their brushwork, too, seems to have changed. Instead of the hard incrusted impasto and the thick lugubrious layers of paint so familiar in the past, the strokes are light and tender in feeling with the canvas occasionally peeping through... a landscape with houses (in spite of its apparent cubistic bleakness) seems bursting with the sort of radiance which EI Greco saw around the hills of Toledo." ("The Painter's Painter: Padamsee Enters Exciting Phase," The Times of India, Bombay, 1 April 1960) His observation about the brushwork is explained by Padamsee: "When I did the Grey series, I was preoccupied with using singular brush strokes across the canvas without any interruptions. This was possible because I was using only grey and did not need to stop. There was no distinction of hue between the background and figure except that at one point it would emerge." (quoted in Padamsee and Garimella eds., p. 180)

Krishen Khanna, Padamsee's contemporary and close friend, was mesmerised when he saw Greek Landscape on the cover of the invitation to the Gallery 59 exhibition. In a conversation with Saffronart, he recalled that it was a Saturday afternoon in Kanpur when he saw the invitation. Khanna recounted that he acquired the painting from Bal Chhabda through a phone conversation. Chhabda said that he would forgo his commission and taking into account the sale of one of Khanna's drawings, he would sell him the painting for a thousand rupees. "So I agreed to Rs. 1,000 and he mailed this painting, and I got it in Kanpur. It was stretched out by two servants for me to see, because we didn't have a wall big enough for this painting, you know. And it stayed with me."

Khanna later wrote to Padamsee in a letter dated 8 April 1960, saying, "My dear Akbar, I might as well be frank - I was terribly envious that you had painted such a magnificent painting... when I saw the painting I sat up. I had received a shock and that hasn't happened to me for a hell of a long time... You see I had thought that this was the work of someone quite unknown to us and I remarked to Renu at that stage that there was a terrific painter somewhere of whose existence we had not known about... It will be a privilege to have this painting with us."

The Grey Works also found admirers among fellow artists apart from Krishen Khanna. Doctor, poet and painter Gieve Patel recalled, "Nothing I had seen in the city till then had moved me. The possibilities of what one could do seemed tangibly present before me in those grey paintings... He is the only Indian painter who has worked out in detail a self-conscious aesthetic of painting." (quoted in Eunice de Souza, Akbar Padamsee, New Delhi: Art Heritage, 1981, p. 14) M F Husain "picked up works of art that caught his fancy. He was greatly impressed by Akbar's canvases and booked the painting titled Juhu for himself." (Padamsee and Garimella eds., p. 181) Artist Sudhir Patwardhan has said, "There can be no two opinions that the painting represents the highest achievement..." (Padamsee and Garimella eds., p. 189)

The present lot has been lent to exhibitions and retrospectives over the years, but has long had a loving home with artist Krishen Khanna. In a letter from Paris dated 6 June 1960 Padamsee wrote to Khanna, "I am delighted to have one of my paintings in your collection." ("Akbar Padamsee Letters to Krishen Khanna," Critical Collective, online) Krishen Khanna recalls, "When Akbar Padamsee launched into his black and white paintings in the late '50s, we all thought that he had found his m??tier and he painted with such zest and authority which seemed to confirm our feelings that we were henceforth going to see only black and white paintings from him." (Padamsee and Garimella eds., pp. 182-183) Ironically, Padamsee has never again painted in grey, moving on to Metascapes after developing a unique construction vocabulary with works such as Greek Landscape.

Of the four large scale grey works from the 1960 exhibition, Juhu was originally owned by M F Husain and subsequently lost, and the other two works have previously been offered at auction and entered important collections in India. In 2011, Reclining Nude (1960), was sold for USD 1.42 million by Sotheby's New York. The following year, Cityscape (1959), sold for USD 1.3 million at Christie's New York. The present lot, Greek Landscape, is the last of the four to enter the auction market and was the signature piece of the exhibition.

Akbar Padamsee in conversation with Meera Godbole-Krishnamurthy, Editor-in-Chief, Saffronart

23 May 2016, Mumbai

Akbar Padamsee has been called a "painter's painter." In conversing with Padamsee, it becomes clear that this phrase does not quite capture his deeply intellectual and analytical mind and his art. Padamsee is an "artists' master." It is as though he visualises objects in space as deconstructions and then reconstructs them on the canvas in simplified form, so that the viewer may better understand the structure of line, form, colour, and tone that he has seen in his mind. Padamsee is constantly "working something out," as he said during our conversation, speaking of his grey paintings. In 1969 he made an eleven minute silent film titled Syzygy,, based on number theory, which he says is his source for all permutations of mapping space. He doesn't find the need for words to explain any further, esoteric as the concept may seem to the viewer. (People have recommended taking an aspirin before watching this film, but we watched it together after only a cup of tea.)

Underneath each of his later luminous Metascapes which leap off the canvas with their incandescent glow, is a clearly mapped out construction of multiple point perspectives, horizon lines and vanishing points situated far beyond the canvas frames, complex enough to give an architect pause. He then paints over this deconstructed reconstruction - I use this term because the entirely rigorous construct comes from Padamsee's memory, not from any existing reality in the physical world as we know it. But to Padamsee, the painted-over scaffolding underneath is still visible. There is a methodology to his paintings that is hidden in plain sight. Greek Landscape is especially significant against this background and in light of Padamsee's subsequent five decade long career as an artist. We see in it the early workings of the master trying to "figure something out." Hidden in shades of grey are the earliest markings of a way of looking, understanding, seeing, and recreating. The limited palette of black, white and grey adds precision to the process without distracting from the pure analysis of form and space, background and foreground, light and shadow. It is not surprising that Krishen Khanna saw in it the work of a genius and acquired the painting immediately upon seeing it. It takes a true artist to recognise a master.

MGK: Tell me about this work.

AP: This was a very large painting, you know, 12 feet long. I had a special wood frame made for it so I could stretch out the whole canvas. Fortunately the courtyard in the building I lived in-in Juhu-was large enough to accommodate the size of this canvas. It was too hot during the day with the bright sunlight, so I worked at night, with lights. There was a dog that used to come and sit with me while I painted. Every night, he would just show up, sit there quietly, and then he disappeared after I was done. He was called Pandu. But I called him Cezanne.

MGK: Perhaps he was channelling the spirit of Cezanne as you "constructed" your painting?

AP: Oh, I don't know.

MGK: So then you didn't roll the canvas out and work in sections, you had the entire stretch unfurled on the frame? Was it flat on the ground? Did that change the way you moved and used the brush?

AP: No, the canvas was not on the ground, it was vertical. There were poles in the courtyard, so the frame was upright, tied to the poles. I maybe painted it in segments, but I was always constructing the whole painting.

MGK: And this is plastic emulsion with brushes?

AP: Yes, it is the plastic emulsion used to paint buildings and homes. I would buy the paint in large tins. Black and white. At the time, the paint I wanted was not available in India. And the paint one got was often glossy, but I was lucky to find a man who sold the non-glossy matte, plastic emulsion. When I told him I was using it for a painting, he said I would need brushes and brought out the painters' brushes he had. The broad ones with the thick bristles. So I bought those from him too.

MGK: Why did you decide to do such large scale works at that time?

AP: I don't know, I just did. I was working something out. The other grey works were smaller canvases, nudes, figurative works. There were four that were of this large scale.

MGK: Why the restriction to black, white and grey? Was it to understand something about light and shadow, or tonal structure? Did working at night help in that sense?

AP: I used black and white and grey because I wanted to understand what colour means. It is a thought process. To construct a painting, you have to understand colour, space, object. It didn't matter if it was day or night, because the thinking happens in the mind.

MGK: Did you miss colour when you did the grey paintings?

AP: No, because I knew that after this, I would use colour in my next paintings. It was there.

MGK: And why is this named Greek Landscape?

AP: (Laughs) Krishen [Khanna] gave it that name! It is just a landscape. I've never even been to Greece!

MGK: Are any of the landscapes from the Grey series set in a real place? Or are they imagined constructions?

AP: They are all from my imagination. None of the cities or buildings are of any real place. They are all from my memory.

MGK: How long did you work on this 'Greek Landscape?' It must have been quite strenuous work, given the scale, and the fact that you only worked at night.

AP: Yes, it was unusual. It took me about a month, with breaks. It's signed 1960. That's when I completed it.

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