Important Notice

“Art is neither conformity to reality nor a flight from it. It is reality itself, a whole new world of experience, the threshold for the passage into the state of freedom.”
- (GROUP 1890 MANIFESTO)

Jagdish Swaminathan was a fiercely individualistic artist, writer, poet, and political activist who sought to redefine Indian modernism. He rejected the idea that Indian modernism had developed solely from associations with the West... “Art is neither conformity to reality nor a flight from it. It is reality itself, a whole new world of experience, the threshold for the passage into the state of freedom.”
- (GROUP 1890 MANIFESTO)

Jagdish Swaminathan was a fiercely individualistic artist, writer, poet, and political activist who sought to redefine Indian modernism. He rejected the idea that Indian modernism had developed solely from associations with the West as well as the “pastoral idealism of the Bengal School.” (Group 1890 Manifesto, Transits of a Wholetimer J Swaminathan: Years 1950-69, New Delhi: Gallery Espace, 2012, p. 70). He believed that modern art was too concerned with the physical world when it was a mysterious sense of poetry that was essential to a painting rather than the narrative or didactic.

Swaminathan held a keen interest in the folk and tribal art of Central India. He drew from their various totemic symbols and simulated their indigenous techniques to form a visual language of his own in his early works. In his quest for artistic purity, he began experimenting with pure colour tones and geometric forms that he referred to as the “Colour Geometry of Space”. By the late 1960s, his exploration of nature and the sublime led him to meld elements of these previous works to create his most iconic compositions, often referred to as the Bird, Mountain, Tree series of which the present lot is a part.

Paintings from this series, which span over two decades, feature these three titular motifs arranged in various permutations against a flat colour field to form singular conceptual landscapes. The artist borrows several formal elements of Pahari and Kangra miniatures in these works-seen in the flat perspective, fine details, and the warm colour palette of the present lot. Like these paintings, the composition is also divided into two sections by vertical bands and further contained within broad borders at the top and bottom.

Though Swaminathan uses recognisable objects in the manner of indigenous symbolism, they are liberated from their associations with the physical world. Instead, he presents them as idealised forms and distorts their perspective and scale. Artist Krishen Khanna notes, “His structures were elemental, uniquely his own. He conjugated them to create undreamt images. Hills, birds, insects, plants, water, air, unbuildable buildings but no human beings… The arena of painting was its own unique universe in which the impossible is credible. A rock suspended in mid-air with a sleek bird atop of it, a mountain reflected in a lake which leaves you guessing as to which is which, and steps on a monument leading nowhere. The entire drama enacted in the richest and most unusual colours.” (Krishen Khanna, J Swaminathan: Contemporary Indian Art Series, New Delhi: Lalit Kala Akademi, 1995)

In the present lot, flat planes of mustard and yellow form a brightly coloured void against which lie a staircase and tree, together cut by a yellow band. Both elements are mirrored in the other half of the canvas by a bird elegantly perched on a boulder suspended in mid-air on top of a mountain. In the placement of these objects, Swaminathan plays with notions of reflection and shadow, thereby raising questions about existence and perception. The staircase can be read as a metaphor for ascension towards enlightenment, knowledge, and immortality, qualities that the tree as a symbol often represents in various mythologies. Art critic Geeta Kapur interprets the bird as belonging “to the element of space; it is the winged metaphor to suggest the infinitude of space.” (Geeta Kapur, “J. Swaminathan Wings of a Metaphor,” Contemporary Indian Artists, New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House Pvt. Ltd., 1978, p. 204)

While Kapur suggests that these imagined landscapes can be viewed as a meditation on “the spiritual sentiment about the unrealized universe” and maya or the illusory nature of the manifest world, Swaminathan never definitively ascribed any particular meaning to these images himself. (Kapur, pp. 203-204) “They are suggestive, open to interpretation: as an expression of the self’s unity with nature, they can be seen as a visual equivalent to the transcendental principle expounded in the Upanishads.” (Amrita Jhaveri, A Guide to 101 Modern and Contemporary Indian Artists, Mumbai: India Book House, 2005, p. 93)

The artist’s works from his Bird, Mountain, Tree series, like the present lot, thus lend themselves to multiple interpretations. Nevertheless, they are luminous and resonate a sense of calm and transcendence, exemplifying Swaminathan’s belief that “a work of art is neither representational nor abstract, figurative or non-figurative. It is unique and sufficient unto itself, palpable in its reality and generating its own life.” (Swaminathan, Group 1890 Manifesto, p. 70)

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