Important Notice

The later paintings of celebrated landscape artist N.S. Bendre demonstrate a marked shift in the artist's manner of constructing visual experiences of physical spaces. The present lot, painted in 1987, five years prior to Bendre's death, exhibits a departure from the pointillist style that had previously characterized his landscapes. Deeply influenced by European modernism, Bendre adopted the scientific style of pointillism, pioneered by... The later paintings of celebrated landscape artist N.S. Bendre demonstrate a marked shift in the artist's manner of constructing visual experiences of physical spaces. The present lot, painted in 1987, five years prior to Bendre's death, exhibits a departure from the pointillist style that had previously characterized his landscapes. Deeply influenced by European modernism, Bendre adopted the scientific style of pointillism, pioneered by Georges Seurat in the late nineteenth century, as a means of cultivating non-representational brush strokes, which he believed depicted nature more in harmony than those attempting to convey dimensionality and volume.

According to art critic Ram Chatterji, who has followed Bendre's career since 1936, this transition in style can be attributed to the artist's philosophy on the relationship of art and scientific knowledge. He notes that Bendre was a firm proponent of art-making prompted by scientific knowledge, as seen in his use of pointillism that relies on the ability of the eye to blend together colours, but believed that it must be discarded the moment it influenced human sensory impulses (Bendre: The Painter and the Person, The Bendre Foundation for Art and Culture & Indus Corporation, Toronto, 1990, p. 59, 60).

In pursuit of realizing on canvas an exact sensory experience of a space, here Bendre employs a muted palette, allowing his eye to solely guide his colour choices. Abandoning a naturalistic portrayal of landscape, Bendre depicts the effect of distance with gradual elimination of details rather than creation of perspective. Here, in a manner that prioritizes aesthetic appeal over context and meaning, Bendre "...expresses a visual experience of things beyond and beside [him]" ("My Painting", Ibid., p. 63).

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