Important Notice

"There is a kind of metamorphosis in every canvas, and the metamorphosis never ends."
- V S GAITONDE

Vasudeo Santu Gaitonde's aesthetic vision was rooted in a deeply meditative sensibility. Although he was loath to calling himself an abstract artist and disliked being slotted into any known genres, Gaitonde is undoubtedly one of India's foremost modern abstract expressionists. According to art historian Gayatri Sinha, "In... "There is a kind of metamorphosis in every canvas, and the metamorphosis never ends."
- V S GAITONDE

Vasudeo Santu Gaitonde's aesthetic vision was rooted in a deeply meditative sensibility. Although he was loath to calling himself an abstract artist and disliked being slotted into any known genres, Gaitonde is undoubtedly one of India's foremost modern abstract expressionists. According to art historian Gayatri Sinha, "In the dogged fidelity to an idea and its execution, Gaitonde's standing in Indian art is unique, as is his contribution in plotting the graph of one stream of Indian modernism." From his modest beginnings of growing up in a chawl in the Girgaum area of Mumbai, Gaitonde went to achieve great acclaim as a formidable artist not only in India, but also internationally. New York Times art critic Holland Cotter has referred to him as "a 20th-century Indian modernist who looked westward, eastward, homeward and inward to create an intensely personalized version of transculturalism, one that has given him mythic stature in his own country and pushed him to the top of the auction charts." (Holland Cotter, "An Indian Modernist With a Global Gaze," The New York Times, 1 January 2015, online)

Gaitonde graduated from the J J School of Art in 1948, and was invited to join the Bombay Progressives in the early 1950s, when he had a studio at the Bhulabhai Desai Memorial Institute. In the decade that followed, Gaitonde experimented with various forms of fi guration and abstraction that showed a certain Western influence, but was also informed by his knowledge of traditional Indian art, including murals, miniatures and Jain manuscripts. By the early 1960s, when the present lot was painted, Gaitonde had departed completely from figuration, and focussed on a "non-objective" mode of expression. He painted with rollers and palette knives rather than brushes, to achieve a deep, monochromatic palette, as seen in the present lot. "He built paint up and scraped it off. He laid it down in layer after aqueous layer, leaving stretches of drying time in between. He said himself that much of his effort as an artist was in the realm of thinking, planning, trying things out. After what appeared to be unproductive periods - he averaged only fi ve or six paintings a year - he suddenly plunged ahead, letting accident have a hand, as he pressed bits of painted paper to canvas to make patterns, or placed paint-soaked strips of cloth on surfaces and left them there, like patches of impasto or embroidery." (Cotter, online)

Executed in a vertical format-an orientation he would work with exclusively from 1968 onwards-the present lot is dark blue, with an inky blackness across the top half of the canvas, and smaller swatches of black at the bottom, most likely achieved through the use of rollers. At the centre is an impasto laden streak, with thick fl ecks of turquoise and black peppered across it. "...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..." (Dnyaneshwar Nadkarni, Gaitonde, New Delhi: Lalit Kala Akademi, 1983, unpaginated)

Of a similar midnight blue painting, now in an important private collection, which was exhibited at the Guggenheim's V. S. Gaitonde: Painting as Process, Painting as Life exhibition in 2015, art critic Rachel Spence writes, it "was less picture than apparition. Th ose sooty indigo strata suggested a moonlit ocean, yet its untitled state warned against narrative readings. The elusive depths, with their sticky, luminous burden, evoked lines by Yeats: "Like a long-legged fly upon the stream./ His mind moves upon silence." (Rachel Spence, "V. S. Gaitonde: Painting as Process, Painting as Life, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice - 'Meditative'," Financial Times, 22 December 2015, online)

The present lot appears to be an image of a horizon separating a dark night sky from a tempestuous sea, but Gaitonde's work was never that literal. Gaitonde's friend, architect Narendra Dengle recounted at a talk at the Goa Art and Literature Festival in 2016, that Gaitonde said, "I never draw things as I see them." What he painted was a deeply personal vision of the physical world filtered through deep interests in Zen philosophy, the teachings of Maharshi Ramana, and the work of Paul Klee and Abstract Expressionism. The influences were many, but his thought process was singular and the resulting art, unique and enigmatic.

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