Important Notice

The present lot is a rare and unusual still life by N S Bendre, who primarily painted pointillist landscapes and village women often in rural settings. Black Flower Vase depicts the eponymous vase filled with a bouquet of pink flowers, rendered in heavy brushstrokes, while a geometric arrangement of yellow and black colour planes denote the juxtaposition of light and shadow in the background.

Painted in 1960, the present lot... The present lot is a rare and unusual still life by N S Bendre, who primarily painted pointillist landscapes and village women often in rural settings. Black Flower Vase depicts the eponymous vase filled with a bouquet of pink flowers, rendered in heavy brushstrokes, while a geometric arrangement of yellow and black colour planes denote the juxtaposition of light and shadow in the background.

Painted in 1960, the present lot was executed during Bendre's brief flirtation with abstract art during the late 1950s. Influenced by Western artists such as Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Wassily Kandinsky, Bendre experimented with principles of Cubism and abstraction-recognising the need for distortion, while equally considering the interplay of colour and space that eventually brought all the various elements together in continuous harmony.

In works such as the present lot, Bendre combines the visual and intuitive aspects of the subject matter, while laying emphasis on "the rhythm and dynamism of the formal arrangement of different elements in the composition... Bendre's abstract experiments concerned both deliberate and accidental forms. In some way, they were deliberately shaped and arranged to obtain total harmony, directing the viewer's eye along a pre-planned path. In others, he created accidental forms by pouring colours of different weight and density on canvas held at different slants, rarely using a brush. In all these, his masterly sense of colour was in full play." (Ram Chatterji, Bendre: The Painter and the Person, Mumbai: The Bendre Foundation for Art and Culture and New Delhi: Indus Foundation, 1990, p. 50)

The artist painted a similar work in 1955, titled Sunflower, which was shown at the Art Society of India's exhibition and received outstanding praise. Two years prior to creating this painting, Bendre was appointed the Dean of the recently established Faculty of Fine Arts at the M S University of Baroda, after teaching there for almost nine years since its inception. Along with his colleagues Sankho Chaudhuri and K G Subramanyan, Bendre was instrumental in establishing the Faculty of Fine Arts as one of the foremost institutions for art teaching in India, while simultaneously cementing his own significance in the history of modern Indian art.

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