Important Notice

In the manifesto he wrote for the short-lived artists’ collective, ‘Group 1890’, Jagdish Swaminathan called for a return to a representation of nature in its ‘virginal state’, a marked deviation from the romanticism of the Bengal School and the mannerism of the Paris School that he believed held sway over modern Indian painting at the time. As the artist elaborates, “…painting was never meant to ‘represent’ reality in the naturalistic... In the manifesto he wrote for the short-lived artists’ collective, ‘Group 1890’, Jagdish Swaminathan called for a return to a representation of nature in its ‘virginal state’, a marked deviation from the romanticism of the Bengal School and the mannerism of the Paris School that he believed held sway over modern Indian painting at the time. As the artist elaborates, “…painting was never meant to ‘represent’ reality in the naturalistic ‘objective’ sense, it was the cogent and poetic rendering of ideal truth in terms of two dimensional space. The fact that the ‘modern’ movement in India did not take off from the spatial concepts evolved in traditional Indian painting at once explains the poverty of its contribution” (as quoted in, Back to the Future 1989-2005, Gallery Espace exhibition catalogue, 2006,not paginated).

The present lot represents one of Swaminathan’s earliest attempts at this simple and clean representation. A conceptual landscape from his famous Bird, Tree and Mountain series, this lot is characterized by bold fields of colour and simplicity of form. With their flat expanses of bright colour reminiscent of Pahari miniatures, these conceptual landscapes communicated Swaminathan’s vision of pure or ‘virginal’ nature. It was his belief that there was a great deal of the universe that remained unrealized to humans, and that these parts could only be discovered through such transcendental, pristine representations. To Swaminathan, then, these canvases were visual guides to a tranquil existence beyond the illusions of daily life.

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