Important Notice

Painted in 1952, this portrait offers a peek into the early stages of V S Gaitonde's career. The artist, who would later achieve fame as one of India's foremost abstractionists, was at this time a recent graduate of the J J School of Art, and a teacher at the same institute for a brief period in 1951. A figurative work painted with a dark, earthy palette, the composition is informed by a study of Indian artistic traditions.

There was... Painted in 1952, this portrait offers a peek into the early stages of V S Gaitonde's career. The artist, who would later achieve fame as one of India's foremost abstractionists, was at this time a recent graduate of the J J School of Art, and a teacher at the same institute for a brief period in 1951. A figurative work painted with a dark, earthy palette, the composition is informed by a study of Indian artistic traditions.

There was an implicit influence of Indian miniature painting evidenced in the way Gaitonde illustrated his early figures in a two-dimensional, almost Cubist style, without much shading, contoured by heavy black outlines and geometric shapes, as seen in the present lot. According to art critic Sandhini Poddar, this kind of articulation had its precursor in Jain painting of the 11th - 15th century, where artists rendered human figures in "three-quarter profiles with fish-shaped eyes, angular postures and narrow waists." (Sandhini Poddar, V S Gaitonde: Painting as Process, Painting as Life, New York: The Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, 2014, p. 20)

The subject of this painting, Bhanu Athaiya, nee Rajopadhye, was a student of Gaitonde at the J J School of Art during his time as a teacher there, and the only woman to be part of the Progressive Artists' Group in Bombay. Athaiya is an Academy Award winning costume designer in the field of Hindi cinema. After graduating from the art school, she began her career as a fashion illustrator for various women's magazines during the 1950s, and eventually went on to design costumes for well-known filmmakers such as Guru Dutt, Yash Chopra, Raj Kapoor, to name a few. Her most notable achievement was winning an Oscar for costume design in Richard Attenborough's 1982 film Gandhi - she was the first Indian to do so.

During his teaching tenure, Gaitonde took his students on various study trips across India, and Athaiya had accompanied him to Udaipur on one of them. "Gaitonde was clearly taken with his attractive young student and her talent, immortalizing her in a painting..." (Meera Menezes, Vasudeo Santu Gaitonde: Sonata of Solitude, Mumbai: Bodhana Arts and Research Foundation, 2016, p. 59) This painting was later acquired by fellow artist Krishen Khanna, who recalls Gaitonde naming the work "the Black Princess" because of Athaiya's dark beauty. "The painting... is rendered in a sombre palette with predominantly brown, ochre and green tones. In this depiction of Bhanu, the artist invokes one of his favourite motifs at the time - that of a woman and a bird. Here, the female protagonist is depicted in profile, gazing at a bird perched on her finger... As Khanna emphasised, "It is absolutely Gaitonde-esque. You can see where he was going from there."" (Menezes, p. 59)

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