Important Notice

By the late 1960s, N.S. Bendre had developed a unique artistic vocabulary that blended traditional representative art with its non-objective counterpart. Having travelled extensively in India and abroad, Ram Chatterjee notes that the artist had become “…conscious of aspects beyond his immediate experience, of total perception in which his mind or emotion played a significant part…He studied the tenets of cubism and became aware of the... By the late 1960s, N.S. Bendre had developed a unique artistic vocabulary that blended traditional representative art with its non-objective counterpart. Having travelled extensively in India and abroad, Ram Chatterjee notes that the artist had become “…conscious of aspects beyond his immediate experience, of total perception in which his mind or emotion played a significant part…He studied the tenets of cubism and became aware of the significance of known aspects of an object, not merely the seen ones. He became aware of the images store in his mind, their context and their total environment – of all the elements that build up the total pictorial structure in a given space” (Bendre: The Painter and the Person, The Bendre Foundation for Art and Culture & Indus Corporation, Toronto, 1990, p. 59, 60).

As Bendre once explained, “…all great works of art have abstract considerations at the root of the process, like establishing aesthetically desirable relationships of parts with the whole” (“My Painting”, Ibid., p. 64). The present lot, a portrait of a flautist executed in 1968, is a good example of the semi-abstract idiom that Bendre turned to in his quest to express his visual experiences in their entirety. Here, the blue-skinned musician’s features are largely undefined, while his posture and the delicate way in which he handles his instrument are clearly represented. As he plays, Bendre filters out all those details irrelevant to his experience of joy in the moment and the music. These superfluous details, including perspective and surroundings, recede completely into the flat greyish ground and blurred and muted backdrop of mosaic-like forms. Another portrait of a musician from the same 1968 series is illustrated on the cover of Chatterjee’s 1990 monograph on the artist, Bendre: The Painter and the Person.

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