Important Notice

Lot 73

Born in Nagpur in 1924, the reclusive painter Vasudeo Gaitonde was an early member of the Bombay Group along with others artists like S. B. Palsikar, Mohan Samant and K. K. Hebbar. However, his strong sense of individualism and perfectionism, which is reflected in his work throughout his career, kept the artist at the fringe of this collective and others like the Progressive Artists` Group. As his biographer and critic Dnyaneshwar Nadkarni... Born in Nagpur in 1924, the reclusive painter Vasudeo Gaitonde was an early member of the Bombay Group along with others artists like S. B. Palsikar, Mohan Samant and K. K. Hebbar. However, his strong sense of individualism and perfectionism, which is reflected in his work throughout his career, kept the artist at the fringe of this collective and others like the Progressive Artists` Group. As his biographer and critic Dnyaneshwar Nadkarni explains, "…Gaitonde isolated himself very early in his career from everything in his environment which he considered irrelevant to his identity as a painter" (Gaitonde, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, 1983, unpaginated). For Gaitonde, then, painting was always a very personal process. His oeuvre can thus be read as a journey of discovery, eventually leading to the very core of his painterly being.

Painted in 1954, around the time that Gaitonde abandoned his highly stylized figuration for a non-representational idiom, the present canvas reveals the artist`s relentless experimentation with texture, light, line and form in the mid 1950`s. Having seen reproductions of the paintings of Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Joan Miro, Gaitonde strove to achieve a similar poetry and lyricism through line and color. Predating his exposure to the minimalist principles of Zen Buddhism, the artist used symbols and hieroglyphic markings along with color and texture in the development of his non-objective vocabulary. In this unique piece, possibly a conceptual still life, various forms float above a table on the richly textured surface. In addition to its colors and precise positioning of forms, the fact that this piece is bounded on left and right by two lighter bands of color is reminiscent of the Jain and Rajasthani traditions of miniature painting.

Viewing the artist`s works of this period, the art critic of Thought, a Delhi publication, wrote in 1960, "Gaitonde`s most impressive quality was the quiet tonal harmony of his semi-abstracts. These arrangements possessed what might be called animation, a kinetic power that imparted movement to the delicately balanced configurations…Gaitonde governed their formulations with a feeling for form that was imperative. He managed to make each construction in color an organ that had its own internal, harmonic life" (Ibid.).

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