Important Notice

Lot 24

 

Quick Zoom

"...the image is never destroyed, however abstract the form and assemblage of space.”
- JEHANGIR SABAVALA

Acknowledging Jehangir Sabavala’s unique contribution to modern Indian art, which refused categorisation or alignment with existing art movements, critic S V Vasudev writes, “Broadly speaking, there are two angles of appreciation when assessing the contribution of artists. Some contribute to the enrichment of tradition, the... "...the image is never destroyed, however abstract the form and assemblage of space.”
- JEHANGIR SABAVALA

Acknowledging Jehangir Sabavala’s unique contribution to modern Indian art, which refused categorisation or alignment with existing art movements, critic S V Vasudev writes, “Broadly speaking, there are two angles of appreciation when assessing the contribution of artists. Some contribute to the enrichment of tradition, the trends of the times, and, thus, to meaningful movements; some to the refinement of our individual sensibility through a gradual enlargement of their own perspective of art and thought. Jehangir Sabavala certainly belongs to the latter group.” (S V Vasudev, Dr Mulk Raj Anand ed., Sabavala, Bombay: Sadanga Series by Vakils, pp. 3 - 4) His distinctive style was influenced by his training in academic realism; the Impressionist techniques he learnt at the Académie Julian; and most significantly, the tenets of Cubism which he studied under André Lhote in Paris between 1949 and 1951.

As the artist’s biographer, critic Ranjit Hoskote, notes, it was not the ideology of Cubism that attracted Sabavala, but rather its formal characteristics. Though precise and meticulously calculated in his approach to art, he was equally guided by a deep intuition, which by the 1950s, urged him to transcend his formal training in favour of a more personal painterly vision. Poet and critic Dilip Chitre observes, “In Sabavala’s work, one finds a trained cubist turning gradually away from rigid formal idiom in order to return to the peculiar character of his native visual environment and developing out of it a coherent language to express an individual vision of the scale of nature and man’s position in it.” (Dilip Chitre, The Reasoning Vision: Jehangir Sabavala’s Painterly Universe, Dilip Chitre and Adil Jussawalla, New Delhi: Tata McGraw-Hill Publishing Company Limited, p. 8)

Hoskote identifies the 1960s as a decade during which the artist “moved ever further from the virtuoso performance and towards the discovery procedure…his preoccupation shifted from genre to theme, from the evocation of the motif to the quest for the image.” (Ranjit Hoskote, “Adventures in Sensation: 1959 – 1962”, The Crucible of Painting: The Art of Jehangir Sabavala, Mumbai: Eminence Designs, 2005, p. 89) The present lot, painted in 1960, beautifully captures Sabavala’s contemplative focus on a single image-in this instance, a boat at sea. Hoskote further remarks, “Ships and birds assumed a particular importance for Sabavala during the late 1950s. The ship is an invitation to paradox: one remains stationary while being in motion on it, and so it presents itself as the most fitting rendition of Sabavala’s underlying theme of passage between a here and an elsewhere that shift definition all the time. The bird, switching between the enclosure of gravity and the openness of flight, negotiates a dialectic of freedom.” (Hoskote, “Coming Home to a Strange Land: 1951 - 59”, p. 68)

The artist’s landscapes and seascapes were often inspired by his travels across Europe and India. He would sketch various forms that he observed in a notebook, later combining elements and “colour notes” from different drawings to create a single canvas. The present lot demonstrates Sabavala’s distinctive adaptation of the Cubist idiom to create a seascape located somewhere between the real and the ideal. With near mathematical precision, he uses angular interlocked planes, with distinctive thick black outlines and a combination of darker tones juxtaposed against brighter panels, to delineate a ship and its sails circled by a flock of birds. The title Incarnadine, a word used to describe the dark red colour of raw flesh, viscerally describes the richly textured surface in varying shades of red. It also brings to mind the lines uttered by the guilt-ridden titular character of Shakespeare’s Macbeth after he murders King Duncan: “Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather / The multitudinous seas incarnadine, / Making the green one red.” Despite its dark palette, the present lot exhibits an inner luminosity derived from Sabavala’s technique of oil painting through which he built up layer on layer of translucent glazes onto the canvas, giving the picture surface subtle but clearly differentiated gradations of hues and a crystalline sheen.

The work is stylistically similar to Sea-gulls and Sails, another painting by Sabavala made in the same year, of which Hoskote writes, “...the weight of the craft is lifted and dissipated in a flurry of flying arcs...this seascape delineates a fascination with the physical prowess of the ship, its speed and the bulk of its displacement.” (Hoskote, “Adventures in Sensation: 1959 - 1962”, p. 89) The overall effect is simultaneously one of energetic movement-birds swooping above a ship as it furrows through the sea-and conversely also that of a moment frozen in time.

Marking the decade as a turning point in Sabavala’s eternal quest towards the sublime, Vasudev remarks, “Sabavala from now on does not rest content in the role of a painter. He has sensed the mystery of the artistic experience, the ethereal pulsation of life, the eternity that hallows the earth, and is aware that a painter has to bring to his work a sense of awe and wonder which any act of creation inherently contains.” (Vasudev, p. 9)

Read More
Artist Profile
Other works of this artist in: this auction  |  entire site