Important Notice

"Every painting has a seed which germinates in the next painting. A painting is not limited to one canvas. I go on adding an element and that's how it evolves." - V S Gaitonde

Vasudeo Santu Gaitonde has always stood apart from his contemporaries, whether in his personality which demanded isolation, or in his aesthetic vision that increasingly exhibited a strong sense of meditative introspection. Although he was loath to calling... "Every painting has a seed which germinates in the next painting. A painting is not limited to one canvas. I go on adding an element and that's how it evolves." - V S Gaitonde

Vasudeo Santu Gaitonde has always stood apart from his contemporaries, whether in his personality which demanded isolation, or in his aesthetic vision that increasingly exhibited a strong sense of meditative introspection. Although he was loath to calling himself an abstract artist and disliked being slotted into any known genres, Gaitonde is today known as one of the foremost Modern abstract expressionists of India. Even when he painted figurations in his early career, he was moving steadily towards abstraction, evident through his works which displayed a "vividness throbbing with life." (Dnyaneshwar Nadkarni, Gaitonde, New Delhi: Lalit Kala Akademi, 1983, unpaginated)

Growing up in the Girgaon area of Mumbai, Gaitonde graduated from the J J School of Art in 1948, and was invited to join the Bombay Progressives in the early 1950s. In the decade that followed, Gaitonde experimented with various forms of figurations, space and abstraction that was "informed by traditional painting in India, which historically consisted of mural painting, illustrated manuscripts (on palm leaf or paper folios), and cloth painting". (Sandhini Poddar, "Polyphonic Modernisms and Gaitonde's Interiorized Worldview", V.S. Gaitonde: Painting as Process, Painting as Life, New York: The Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, 2014, p. 20)

Departing almost completely from figuration, Gaitonde began utilising a "non-objective" mode of expression. "...Gaitonde was also working with painting itself. The creation of texture in an unconventional way, the use of thick lugubrious pigment, the evocation of light and, finally, the subtle balancing of the image on canvas as if it were undulating on water and gradually surfacing in the light-all these attainments of a time when the individual canvases themselves may not be far too distinctive. The need to establish a meaningful relationship between line and painted surface remains with Gaitonde for quite some time-before his art takes the first turn towards the period of his major achievement." (Nadkarni, unpaginated)

Gaitonde's canvases from the 1960s onwards displayed a monochromatic palette, which he achieved through the use of rollers and palette knives, instead of brushes. The results of this stage of experimentation-accompanied by calligraphic strokes and hieroglyphs in ink-were by and large an extension of his personal engagement with Zen Buddhist philosophy. In 1964, Gaitonde was granted the John D Rockefeller III fellowship to live and work in New York, where he had a solo exhibition at the Willard Gallery the following year.

A testament to Gaitonde's meticulous process, the present lot illustrates his precise control over the medium, and his masterful ability to achieve a subtle balance between earthiness and a sense of the ephemeral. The surface is built with subtly graded, translucent layers of orange, rust and umber, running from a darker and more heavily layered lower band, which anchors the image, to its almost fluid centre, where a few intense points of pigment have been allowed to punctuate the layers and escape to the surface.

"Around 1968, one notices a shift from the early horizontal canvases to the dominating format of the verticals, which the artist continued to utilize until his last works from 1997-98." (Poddar, p. 28) The present lot, painted in 1971, belongs to this vertical format phase of the artist's career. A similar 1970 painting, in variations of rust, forms part of Dr. Homi Bhabha's TIFR collection of early Gaitonde works. A precursor to the present lot, this collection "bears witness to the next major phase in Gaitonde's career..." (Mortimer Chatterjee and Tara Lal, The TIFR Art Collection, Mumbai: Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, 2010, p. 94)

Gaitonde achieved several accolades in his time. A year after he created this painting, he received the Padma Shri. This, in tandem with his permanent move to New Delhi, marked a new phase of artistic growth and achievement, cementing his position in the history of Indian art.

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