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Lot 57

 

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An accomplished portraitist, Rameshwar Broota has centred the human form in his practice, specifically the male figure, for most of his career. This preoccupation can be seen as early as his figurative works from the late 1960s that focus on the emaciated, taut strength of labourers’ bodies. Drawn to “the tensile strength of their rippling muscles as they pushed and pulled and grappled with heavy loads or worked with hammer and other tools”, he... An accomplished portraitist, Rameshwar Broota has centred the human form in his practice, specifically the male figure, for most of his career. This preoccupation can be seen as early as his figurative works from the late 1960s that focus on the emaciated, taut strength of labourers’ bodies. Drawn to “the tensile strength of their rippling muscles as they pushed and pulled and grappled with heavy loads or worked with hammer and other tools”, he created works which “invested them with heroic dimensions, an ode to rugged fortitude.” (Ella Datta, “Archaeology of Experience,” Rameshwar Broota, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 2004, p. 12).

An impulsive act led Broota to develop a unique technique to excavate the primal strength of man from his canvas: impatient to get started before the wash of paint on his canvas had dried, he picked up a blade and began to scratch out a form. “The rhythmic scraping of the pigment is then modulated through variations of pressure applied by the hand. Broota has indeed improvised his unique technique by overlapping procedures of painting and scraping or scratching the layers, for precision of contours, textures, and to draw out anatomies hidden under the immediate skin. The mind and body are equally challenged in this process that demands long hours of disciplined movement of hand, intimate contact of the eye with the working surface and a regulated body posture that supports the act of such manic intensity.” (Roobina Karode, Rameshwar Broota: Interrogating the Male Body, New Delhi: Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, 2015, p. 150)

From this technique was born the Man series of the 80s where Broota’s nude male subjects were shorn of clothes and other social markers to be restored to a primal state; his naked male forms exuded a primordial strength. After a foray into abstraction in the 90s, the artist returned to the male figure in the new millennium, when he incorporated his long-held interest in photography into his established paint-scratching process of portraiture. He would first photograph the part of the body he intended to draw, modify it as he needed on the computer, and then recreate the image on a painted canvas by hand.

In his Confrontation series, of which lot 57 is a part, the strong and vigorous male body of the 80s makes a return, visually marked by the ravages of time. Man’s naked, headless torso is introduced to the industrial forms that he has made but which now threaten to overwhelm him. Against a spare, dark background, the human body, now old and soft, stands in startling and alarming contrast to the hard and angular man- made form that threatens its very existence. “Broota’s paintings from his early phases metamorphosed man and nature on monumental canvases, but in Confrontation, he juxtaposes man and industrial/architectural components, articulating here the friction between vulnerable human flesh and sharp built fragments. This is the human directly placed in confrontation with concrete angularities and metallic chains, threatened by an urban ‘invasion’ or a menacing city. This up close encounter is amplified by an imagined dark ambience in the painting, where everything else is meticulously nullified to alert us to the impending catastrophe.” (Roobina Karode, Rameshwar Broota: Interrogating the Male Body, New Delhi: Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, 2015, p. 150). Rameshwar Broota’s singular technique, which is a result of a long meditative artistic process, is a fitting expression for his changing relationship with his long-standing subject.

FROM THE COLLECTION OF JANE AND KITO DE BOER

Jane and Kito de Boer’s collection is a rare survey of Indian painting from the late 19th century to the present day, covering major movements including photography, the Bengal School, the Progressive Artists from Bombay, and many different developments in Delhi and its environs since Independence.

This collection, one of the largest in private hands, is remarkable for its broad historical scope and represents critical periods in Indian art history. Besides notable names including F N Souza, M F Husain, and Somnath Hore, the collection also highlights the best works of lesser-known artists such as Prakash Karmakar, Nikhil Biswas, and J Sultan Ali who played a significant role in the development of Indian art. Alongside their strong aesthetics, the significance of many of the works in the collection is deepened by the de Boers’ personal association or encounters with several of the artists like Rameshwar Broota and Laxma Goud.

In their words, “One of the most important aspects of the collection is that it is a personal journey: it is our journey.... We are individuals following our passion and our collection is the sum of what we see and whom we meet. We have the art collection we have, with all its twists and turns.”

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