Important Notice

“The mind moves through the object to the idea, and through the idea to the object. Thus, the work becomes concrete and abstract at the same time.” - JAGDISH SWAMINATHAN

Jagdish Swaminathan's art was informed by his profound interest in the folk and tribal art of Central India. Born in Simla in 1928, it was not until the 1950s that Swaminathan began to paint full-time. At this time, he questioned, and rejected, the notion that... “The mind moves through the object to the idea, and through the idea to the object. Thus, the work becomes concrete and abstract at the same time.” - JAGDISH SWAMINATHAN

Jagdish Swaminathan's art was informed by his profound interest in the folk and tribal art of Central India. Born in Simla in 1928, it was not until the 1950s that Swaminathan began to paint full-time. At this time, he questioned, and rejected, the notion that Indian modernism developed from encounters with the West.

In 1962, he, along with some others, formed Group 1890, a short-lived artists' collective, which was vehemently opposed to both the idealism of the Bengal School and the mannerism of European Modernism. Instead, Swaminathan strove to find the roots of a truly Indian modern art in the foundations of Indian art as traced through tribal traditions. As stated by the artist, "...painting was never meant to 'represent' reality in the naturalistic 'objective' sense, it was the cogent and poetic rendering of ideal truth in terms of two-dimensional space. The fact that the 'modern' movement in India did not take off from the spatial concepts evolved in traditional Indian painting at once explains the poverty of its contribution." (Artist quoted in Back to the Future: 1989-2005, New Delhi: Gallery Espace, 2006)

It is due to this manner of thinking that Swaminathan's art evokes a unique idiom that was developed from an assemblage of symbols. According to friend and fellow artist Krishen Khanna, Swaminathan "...was fascinated by the manner in which tribal perceptions created symbolic forms...Significantly, the paintings of the last phase of his life were concerned with the passage of a sign on its way to becoming a symbol. A symbol by its very nature is a means of communication sometimes of very complex ideas and it assumes a commonality of understanding between the maker and the receiver. In the case of Swami's paintings, the marks made with intentions and equally those which just happened to get there by virtue of the process, do not create symbols in the sense I have mentioned, but the completed painting is itself symbolic of the act of painting itself." (Lalit Kala Contemporary 40: J Swaminathan, New Delhi: Lalit Kala Akademi, 1995)

Although Swaminathan's practice eventually segued into the Bird, Mountain and Tree series that he is well-known for, he returned to and refined his earlier obsession with tribal and folk arts in the 1980s, following his founding of the Roopanker Museum of Art at Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal on the invitation of the government of Madhya Pradesh. Exploring what he himself described as his "natural bent for the primeval," the artist experimented with a 'primitive' system of communications, adopting ancient symbology as a tool to reconnect modern Indian art with its indigenous precursors. This helped him start "on a new phase recalling my work of the early sixties. If my work of the early sixties anticipated the journey of the eighties, my present phase recapitulates my beginnings." ("The Cygan: An Auto-bio note," Lalit Kala Contemporary 40: J Swaminathan, p. 13)

Works from this later period of Swaminathan's life, such as the present lot, painted a year before his passing, make real the artist's desire to establish a continuum between folk, tribal and modern art, and his belief that the philosophical underpinnings of Indian art have a place in contemporary art practice. The deliberately unstructured manner in which Swaminathan arranges his forms and symbols on the canvas echo the manner in which the same symbols were used in folk art. The emphasis here "...is on primal Indian symbols and their contemporary relevance, on indigenous abstraction, and the free surface treatment of the canvas." In these canvases, textured to look like decorated walls, Swaminathan uses combinations of "...pre-iconographic symbols like the lotus, the sun, the square and triangle, the lingam, the swastika" to imbue each painting with multiple layers of meaning. (Gayatri Sinha, India: Contemporary Art from Northeastern Private Collections, Rutgers- New Brunswick: Jane Voorhess Zimmerli Art Museum, 2002, p. 117)

Simultaneously experimenting with technique in works such as the present lot, Swaminathan used natural pigments bound to the surface with a wax-based medium in these works. Emulating tribal wall paintings, the artist employed his own fingers and rubber rollers to texture these earthy pigments and create varying levels of opacity within the same colour field. At the same time, form and colour are intertwined to create a harmony devolved from ancient Indian systems of representation and communication. Like cave drawings, he etches and scratches figures onto his canvas. Pre-iconographic symbols, such as the square and the triangle, and pure, thin colours derived from natural pigments emulate tribal art, creating visual imagery that is at once ancient, modern, and entirely Indian.

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