Important Notice

This canvas, from 1960, is based on Sabavala’s early memories India. These flowers, blooming at the base of some trees on a verdant slope, are perhaps part of Sabavala’s reminiscences of in Mahableshwar, a hillside retreat close to his home in the city of Mumbai where his family maintained a house. As Ranjit Hoskote puts it, “His celebration of the ecstasy and trauma of the natural world, which was to be evinced with increasing strength in his... This canvas, from 1960, is based on Sabavala’s early memories India. These flowers, blooming at the base of some trees on a verdant slope, are perhaps part of Sabavala’s reminiscences of in Mahableshwar, a hillside retreat close to his home in the city of Mumbai where his family maintained a house. As Ranjit Hoskote puts it, “His celebration of the ecstasy and trauma of the natural world, which was to be evinced with increasing strength in his work after the 1960s, has its origins in the vivid impressions of his Indian childhood.” (Ranjit Hoskote, The Crucible of Painting: The Art of Jehangir Sabavala, 2005, p. 82)

In fact, it was in the “cloistered, perfumed world” of Mahableshwar, that Sabavala believes his “oblique sensuality, his tactile appetite for mineral, animal and floral forms was first aroused.” (Ibid., p. 84)

In terms of style, it was in this same period that the artist began to weave his own imperatives into the Cubist style he had so deftly learnt from masters like Andr? Lhote in the Paris art schools he attended from 1947 to 1957. According to Hoskote, Sabavala had a clear agenda in mind for the liberation of his paintings from “the straitjacket of Cubist machinery” – he wanted to “render the spirit and symbolic nature of place…edit and format his paintings in an aesthetically satisfying manner…and…communicate to his putative viewership the operatic sense of an identity negotiating with its ambiance, expressing its findings in rich colour, exuberant motif, innovative strategies of design.” (Ibid., p. 85)

Through its exuberance in style and subject, then, this 1960 canvas marks an important turning point in Sabavala’s oeuvre and in his sense of self and his relationship to his work as well.

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