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Lot 16

 

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The present lot, painted when Akbar Padamsee lived in Paris in the early 1950s, represents the earliest phase of the artist's lifelong preoccupation with the human figure. Speaking about these works, Yashodhara Dalmia notes, "Padamsee's early figures, done in the 1950s, were almost iconic in their rigid, frontal stances and the thickly contoured angularity of the bodies. These stiffly erect, archaic forms evoked a feeling of a distant obeisance... The present lot, painted when Akbar Padamsee lived in Paris in the early 1950s, represents the earliest phase of the artist's lifelong preoccupation with the human figure. Speaking about these works, Yashodhara Dalmia notes, "Padamsee's early figures, done in the 1950s, were almost iconic in their rigid, frontal stances and the thickly contoured angularity of the bodies. These stiffly erect, archaic forms evoked a feeling of a distant obeisance to cult images rather than any human interaction" (The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2001, p. 213).

The black lines that etch the face and torso out of the background, the earthy palette of umber and sienna, the rigid frontality of the subject, and the quiet gravity of her gaze, all point to the deep impact that primitive Indian art, particularly religious icons and sculptures, had on Padamsee as he set out on his artistic career.

Geeta Kapur traces the line that connects the two, explaining that "…the prototype of these early portraits was that magnificent little sculpted head from Mohenjodaro, the bearded man wearing a decorative robe. In the process of evolution this Indian-Mesopotamian prototype developed into a prophet from the Semitic tradition…endowed with a concentrated, an obsessive, a greatly knowing presence. Akbar has sought to achieve this very presence in his figures; to give them the energy of withheld pain which, when it suffuses the body, gives it a presence" ("Akbar Padamsee: The Other Side of Solitude", Contemporary Indian Artists, Vikas Publishing House Pvt. Ltd., New Delhi, 1978, p. 88, 89).

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