Born in Nagpur in 1924, Vasudeo Gaitonde moved to Bombay at the age of nineteen to study at the Sir J.J. School of Art there. On graduating, he became an associate of the Progressive Artists’ Group and an early member of the Bombay Group along with other artists like S.B. Palsikar, Mohan Samant and K.K. Hebbar. However, a strong sense of individualism and perfectionism, which is reflected in his work throughout his career, kept Gaitonde a recluse, remaining at the fringe of these artists’ collectives.

Speaking about his early work in 1957, the critic G.M. Butcher describes Gaitonde’s line as ‘musical’. He also notes that the artist, although ‘little known’ in Bombay at the time, had managed to maintain a poetic balance between the East and the West in his work, fluently combining influences from sources as far ranging as Jain and Basholi miniature painting traditions and the work of Paul Klee (“Contemporary Painting in Bombay”, College Art Journal, Vol. 16 No. 2, 1957, p. 114-116).

This rare 1952 canvas, an early portrait of Bhanu Rajopadhye Athaiya, reflects the confluence that Butcher describes in its stylized figuration, spare but confident palette and lyrical line. Like Gaitonde, Athaiya was loosely associated with the Progressive Artists’ Group (PAG) in Bombay during the late 1940s and early 1950s. The short lived collective’s only woman associate, she went on to become a renowned costume designer, winning an Oscar for her work on the film ‘Gandhi’ in 1982. Here, Gaitonde paints Athaiya holding a bird, a subject he returned to frequently at the time, and which, according to his first biographer Dnyaneshwar Nadkarni, “stamp[ed] out the young Gaitonde as a painter to be watched” in 1952 (Gaitonde, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, 1983, not paginated).

Born in Nagpur in 1924, Vasudeo Gaitonde moved to Bombay at the age of nineteen to study at the Sir J.J. School of Art there. On graduating, he became an associate of the Progressive Artists’ Group and an early member of the Bombay Group along with other artists like S.B. Palsikar, Mohan Samant and K.K. Hebbar. However, a strong sense of individualism and perfectionism, which is reflected in his work