Important Notice

"Human beings in their local environment, climate, provincial society; this should be the ultimate goal of the artist." - BHUPEN KHAKHAR

In the Tradesman, painted in 1986, Bhupen Khakhar returns, in part, to his preferred subject of the previous decade. Similar to the present lot, these works focussed on a solitary middle-class individual - at times a worker, a watchmaker, or even an accountant - in their natural or... "Human beings in their local environment, climate, provincial society; this should be the ultimate goal of the artist." - BHUPEN KHAKHAR

In the Tradesman, painted in 1986, Bhupen Khakhar returns, in part, to his preferred subject of the previous decade. Similar to the present lot, these works focussed on a solitary middle-class individual - at times a worker, a watchmaker, or even an accountant - in their natural or occupational environment. "Khakhar began a series of portraits called 'trade paintings' in the early 1970s, which, at a square metre, were roughly the size of a common shop sign. They described the professions of their subjects in the hybrid manner of eighteenth-century colonial paintings referred to as the Company School... But rather than true likeness or documentation of the various trades, they were 'a most compassionate inventory, an effort to touch and handle what is real'." (Nada Raza, "A Man Labelled Bhupen Khakhar Branded as Painter," Chris Dercon and Nada Raza eds., Bhupen Khakhar: You Can't Please All, London: Tate Modern, 2016, p. 16)

Despite the deliberately banal subject matter, according to Geeta Kapur, Khakhar still "finds on his canvas a place for the insignificant man: a place that is so much like actual environment that the subject will not feel alien in it. And by giving him this place in a work of art, he enthrones the insignificant man in our imagination." (Quoted in Timothy Hyman, Bhupen Khakhar, Mumbai: Chemould Publication and Arts, 1998, p. 41) Through his unique language and idiom, Khakhar plucks these obscure figures from the shadows and "raises them up..." (Hyman, p. 43)

Although there was an element of satire in these paintings, Khakhar's treatment of these figures had a compassionate approach. In an interview with Ulli Beier, Khakhar once said: ???I also am at a loss to know what exactly my feelings are towards these people... I come from the same class. So I feel some kind of immediate identification with them." (Artist quoted in Hyman, p. 45)

"This was more than an interest in the vernacular; it was a commitment to representing his own experience, what he simply called 'truth'..." (Nada, p. 18) In works like the present lot, Khakhar's homage to the 'insignificant man' also represents a greater commitment to preserving the disappearing figure in the artistic milieu of the latter half of 20th century. At a time when most modernists eschewed narrative or figurative elements, Khakhar stood apart as an iconoclast, his paintings inventing a new visual vocabulary that was hitherto unseen.

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