Important Notice

Lot 1

 

Quick Zoom

Describing K.H. Ara’s body of work, Rudy von Leyden, an art critic and one of the artist’s staunchest supporters, noted, “With all its various facets, his work has a pervading quality of totality and unity…there is a total grasp of each of his subjects and their moods, a total imaginative creation of reality which is so persuasive that people from all walks of life, from the simple and innocent to the sophisticated and refined, appreciate it... Describing K.H. Ara’s body of work, Rudy von Leyden, an art critic and one of the artist’s staunchest supporters, noted, “With all its various facets, his work has a pervading quality of totality and unity…there is a total grasp of each of his subjects and their moods, a total imaginative creation of reality which is so persuasive that people from all walks of life, from the simple and innocent to the sophisticated and refined, appreciate it without effort. Herein lies the secret of Ara’s success which is, in this semi-desert that is called art life in India, quite unique and spectacular. This unity is not only a technical one expressed in terms of composition and correlation, but one of vision and sensibility” (Marg, Volume VI, Number 2, March 1953, p. 52, 55).

The present lot, probably one of the earliest nudes Ara painted after turning to the form in the 1960s, is unusual in its delicacy, frontality, palette and format. Most of the artist’s nudes were voluptuously large, had their backs to the viewer, and were executed in earthy tones of gouache on paper. Standing in a classical posture with a bird perched on one hand, the subject of this canvas is both bold and graceful. Asking what the raison d’être for Ara’s nudes was, Yashodhara Dalmia notes, “He drew from several sources, but his commitment was to modernism and everything was grist to the mill of painterly language. He was not involved with the anatomy of the figure nor with forms of realism. He was seeking a means of extending his language in colour, form, and composition and the nudes became an important component of this” (The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2001, p. 139).

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