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Lot 12

 

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As a result of his decade long tenure as Founder and Director of the Roopanker Museum at Bharat Bhavan in Bhopal in the 1980s, Jagdish Swaminathan gained a deep knowledge and appreciation of tribal art, particularly that of Central India. Attempting to reconnect modern Indian art with its indigenous precursors, the artist adopted much of its ancient symbology in his own work. Abandoning the pristine depictions of nature in his Mountain, Bird and... As a result of his decade long tenure as Founder and Director of the Roopanker Museum at Bharat Bhavan in Bhopal in the 1980s, Jagdish Swaminathan gained a deep knowledge and appreciation of tribal art, particularly that of Central India. Attempting to reconnect modern Indian art with its indigenous precursors, the artist adopted much of its ancient symbology in his own work. Abandoning the pristine depictions of nature in his Mountain, Bird and Tree series, he shifted his focus towards a more primitive communication of the unrealized universe through tantric forms and tribal signs.

“Madhya Pradesh also brought about a basic shift in my painting again. The live and vibrant contact with tribal cultures triggered off my natural bent for the primeval, and I started on 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” (Jagdish Swaminathan, “The Cygan: An Auto-bio note”, Lalit Kala Contemporary 40, New Delhi, March 1995, p. 13).

According to friend and fellow artist Krishen Khanna, Swaminathan “…was fascinated by the manner in which tribal perceptions created symbolic forms…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” (J. Swaminathan, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, 1995, unpaginated).

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