Important Notice

During the 1980s, Jagdish Swaminathan’s work underwent a significant shift in technique and style. He moved on from the pristine depictions of nature of his Bird, Mountain and Tree series and began to utilize a more primitive style with symbols and techniques derived from tribal art. Shortly after their wedding in 1955, he and his wife spent their honeymoon in Betul, Madhya Pradesh, where Swaminathan came upon a young boy in a tribal village who... During the 1980s, Jagdish Swaminathan’s work underwent a significant shift in technique and style. He moved on from the pristine depictions of nature of his Bird, Mountain and Tree series and began to utilize a more primitive style with symbols and techniques derived from tribal art. Shortly after their wedding in 1955, he and his wife spent their honeymoon in Betul, Madhya Pradesh, where Swaminathan came upon a young boy in a tribal village who was being revived by a witch doctor after having been bitten by a snake. “This early encounter with tribal life was to have a deep impact on my later life… Madhya Pradesh also brought about a basic shift in my painting again. The live and vibrant contact with tribal cultures triggered off my natural bent for the primeval, and I started on a new phase recalling my work of the early sixties,” the artist wrote in an essay in 1993. (Jagdish Swaminathan, “The Cygan: An Auto-Bio Note,” Lalit Kala Contemporary 40, New Delhi: Lalit Kala Akademi, 1995, pp. 9, 13)

Swaminathan continued to immerse himself in tribal life after setting up the Roopankar Museum, dedicated to tribal, folk, and contemporary art, at Bharat Bhawan in 1982 on invitation of the Madhya Pradesh government. As seen in the present lot, the artist employed symbols such as the bird and snake and certain geometrical forms like the triangle to create an entirely new representational language. In these canvases, textured to look like decorated walls, Swaminathan uses combinations of “…pre- iconographic symbols like the lotus, the sun, the square and triangle, the lingam, the swastika” to imbue each painting with multiple layers of meaning (Gayatri Sinha, India: Contemporary Art from Northeastern Private Collections, Jane Voorhess Zimmerli Art Museum, 2002, p. 117) These, he noted, had a “magical” rather than ritualistic significance for him. “The arrangement of geometric forms generates memory associations whose roots are in the racial, collective psyche… The introduction of the representational context in terms of colour geometry gives birth to psycho-symbolic connotations. Thus a mountain remains not a mountain but becomes the abode of Shiva. It becomes a totem capable of exercising its magical eternal influence on who come within its field of vision. (Jagdish Swaminathan, “The Cube and the Rectangle,” Lalit Kala Contemporary 40, New Delhi: Lalit Kala Akademi, 1995, pp. 22-23)

Simultaneously experimenting with technique, Swaminathan used natural pigments bound to the surface with a wax based medium. Emulating tribal wall paintings, the artist employed his own fingers and rubber rollers to texture these earthy pigments through rapid calligraphic movements and create varying levels of opacity within the same colour field. Works such as the present lot are thus demonstrative of the artist’s desire to establish a continuum between folk, tribal and modern art, and his belief that Modernism can incorporate a visual language that is at once ancient, modern, and entirely Indian.

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