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Lot 49

 

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“Colour is wave-length. It has greater or lesser frequency, faster or slower speed. Certain colours, for instance, red, reach the eye before blue. This creates dimension. Colour orchestration becomes sculpture... Colour breaks the speed of looking.” - AKBAR PADAMSEE

Akbar Padamsee’s extensive travels through India, Europe, and North America during the 1950s and early ‘60s introduced him to the paintings of Paul Klee and,... “Colour is wave-length. It has greater or lesser frequency, faster or slower speed. Certain colours, for instance, red, reach the eye before blue. This creates dimension. Colour orchestration becomes sculpture... Colour breaks the speed of looking.” - AKBAR PADAMSEE

Akbar Padamsee’s extensive travels through India, Europe, and North America during the 1950s and early ‘60s introduced him to the paintings of Paul Klee and, subsequently, Goethe’s colour theory. It was in Paris that he came across the first volume of Klee’s notebooks, The Thinking Eye, which contained material that the artist used for his lectures on art and the creative process. “But it was the section on colour, which included Goethe’s colour theory, that was of particular interest to Padamsee. It gave him a deep understanding of colour, which explains why he is often regarded in Indian art circles as a consummate colourist.” (Meera Menezes, “Akbar Padamsee: Consummate colourist, caring peer, anti-censorship champion and ever-evolving artist,” Firstpost, 8 January 2020, online)

It is perhaps a result of this understanding that colour and light went on to play a critical role in Padamsee’s works over the ensuing decades. Describing this period of Padamsee’s work, Beth Citron notes, “At this time, he began an earnest investigation of light, colour, and form through village landscape studies, following a classically French tradition that included Lorrain and Corot to Cézanne [...] Through these studies, Padamsee began to develop his own distinct idiom [...] with individual houses and churches reduced to opaque squares and triangles, even as the composite images would remain referential and legible as a landscape [...] skeletons of bustling crowded settlements (like Rouen) as of those sites hollowed of houses where large swathes of colour intimate a densely thick atmosphere.” (Beth Citron, “Akbar Padamsee’s Artistic Landscape of the ‘60s,” Bhanumati Padamsee and Annapurna Garimella eds., Akbar Padamsee: Work in Language, Mumbai: Marg Publications and Pundole Art Gallery, 2010, pp. 195-197)

Padamsee’s extensive travel also prompted him to explore landscape painting as he encountered diverse terrains. Transcending notions of time and space, these landscapes became the central focus of his artistic practice during this decade. “Rather than an intent to describe the natural world per se, the artist’s object was the total conceptual and metaphysical ken of his visual environment, with his paintings impressing an immediate perceptual experience that relied on expression and sensation rather than realist recognition.” (Padamsee and Garimella eds., p. 195)

The present lot, with its expansive colour fields, signals a shift towards abstraction from Padamsee’s structured landscapes of the early 1960s. During this period, the artist worked on creating landscapes which contained some recognisable elements from nature but were otherwise stripped of all geographic or chronological specificity. His works speak of a deliberate distancing from the human figure as he chose to centre his focus on natural vistas instead.

Padamsee explores a wider, more saturated palette in the present lot, using colours that are deep and earthy, marking a clear transition from the black, white, and grey palette of the previous decade. The brushstrokes evoke an almost sculptural texture and terrain as the artist uses flashes of luminescent colour against a darker ground, applied skilfully with sharp, almost violent strokes of the brush and palette knife.

The fiery red that forms the central band, sandwiched between the darker horizontals, is a precursor to Padamsee’s Metascape series that followed in the 1970s, dominated by richly textured and vivid palettes of red and blue. In works such as the present lot, Padamsee began constructing landscapes focussing on form, structure, and colour, which were devoid of indications of space and time. This painting shares a sensibility of abstraction in the landscape with Padamsee’s 1963 painting titled Delta, in which too, colours are layered to suggest a ghost-like fluidity that defies identification.

Padamsee’s works from the 1960s, as seen in the present lot, “...tend towards stark and dark reduction, resulting in compositions that appear significantly more conceptualized than the earlier series, if still legible and oriented as landscapes... by formally pulling back and presenting angular, broad panoramas of unpopulated land, Padamsee draws the viewer’s attention to the rhetorical emptiness of these landscapes; that is, rather than these vistas appearing coincidentally or casually as if there are no people passing through them, they demonstrate a conscious, strategic approach to appear exclusively non-figural.” (Padamsee and Garimella eds., pp. 206, 208)

The present lot, thus, becomes a demonstration of Padamsee’s rigorous and disciplined approach to his craft. “His method is quite contrary to that of the expressionists who use colour directly to express the turbulence or violence of their emotions without subjecting it to any discipline. In Padamsee’s work, colour is always subordinate to a structural basis. The texture of the paintings done in this period is by no means a superfluous detail; it is part of the meaning of the picture.” (Sham Lal, “Akbar Padamsee,” Padamsee: Sadanga Series on Modern and Contemporary Indian Art, Mumbai: Vakils Publications, p. 8)

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