Important Notice

“Each line drawn, each form shaped, tone, colour, the tension, space, proportion, their interrelation, has its reason to be, its proper logic, a logical existence, sequence, and consequence.” - AKBAR PADAMSEE

Akbar Padamsee's landscapes from the early 1960s are reminiscent of the French countryside but transcend a specific location. These works were deeply influenced by his travels in and around France, as well as his visit to New... “Each line drawn, each form shaped, tone, colour, the tension, space, proportion, their interrelation, has its reason to be, its proper logic, a logical existence, sequence, and consequence.” - AKBAR PADAMSEE

Akbar Padamsee's landscapes from the early 1960s are reminiscent of the French countryside but transcend a specific location. These works were deeply influenced by his travels in and around France, as well as his visit to New York in 1963 and 1964 on a John D Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship. "Throughout the 1950s and early '60s, Padamsee travelled between the cosmopolitan centres of Paris and Bombay... Absorbing diverse visual terrains across India and Europe, and, beginning in 1963, of North America too, Padamsee began to explore landscape painting as a genre in the late 1950s. In spite of (or perhaps because of) spending the 1960s transiting among urban hubs in three continents, imaginative natural landscapes became one of Padamsee's central artistic projects during that decade." (Beth Citron, "Akbar Padamsee's Artistic 'Landscape' of the '60s," Bhanumati Padamsee and Annapurna Garimella eds., Akbar Padamsee: Work in Language, Mumbai: Marg Publications and Pundole Art Gallery, 2010, p. 195)

The present lot was painted during a period when the artist had returned from Paris to Bombay and was transitioning between places and styles. Here, architecture takes precedence over space with closely packed houses set against a vibrant blue sky filling the narrow canvas. The work underscores Padamsee's interest in structure and makes use of a colour palette that foreshadows his later work. According to literary critic and journalist Sham Lal, "His method is quite contrary to that of the expressionists who use colour directly to express the turbulence or violence of their emotions without subjecting it to any discipline. In Padamsee's work, colour is always subordinate to a structural basis. The texture of the paintings done in this period is by no means a superfluous detail; it is part of the meaning of the picture." (Sham Lal, "Akbar Padamsee," Padamsee: Sadanga Series on Modern and Contemporary Indian Art, Mumbai: Vakils Publications, 1964, p. 8)

In the present lot, Padamsee abandons the use of perspective and instead places each structure above the other, building up the scene plane by plane. Executed using a palette knife, the structures take form through swatches of colour - umber, orange, beige and black, with a deep blue sky visible in the background. According to Beth Citron, in similar works of this period, "individual houses [were] reduced to opaque squares and triangles, even as the composite image would remain referential and legible as a landscape." (Padamsee and Garimella eds., p. 197) The work marks the beginning of Padamsee's transition from landscapes with recognisable architectural forms, to abstract, expansive landscapes, though his underlying interest in structure remains a constant throughout.

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