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Lot 16

 

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Founder of Group 1890, a short-lived artists’ collective, Jagdish Swaminathan actively chose to chart a move away from the academic limitations of the Bengal School of thought as well as of European Modernism. “The attraction of the eleven-member Group 1890 to material/ritual/occult signs reissued the modernist enterprise for the coming years. It came to be situated with peculiar aptness in a visual culture of iconic forms still extant in India.... Founder of Group 1890, a short-lived artists’ collective, Jagdish Swaminathan actively chose to chart a move away from the academic limitations of the Bengal School of thought as well as of European Modernism. “The attraction of the eleven-member Group 1890 to material/ritual/occult signs reissued the modernist enterprise for the coming years. It came to be situated with peculiar aptness in a visual culture of iconic forms still extant in India. The indigenism produced a playful modernist vocabulary replete with metaphorical allusions” (Geeta Kapur, When was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India, Tulika books, New Delhi, 2000, p. 307).

Swaminathan, in his quest for this new modernist ‘Indian’ vocabulary, turned to the local, exploring not only the folk art of varied regions, but also the historically significant miniature traditions of North-Western India. The Bird, Tree, Mountain series of canvases that the artist began to paint in late 1960s stands testimony to his attempts at instituting a new idiom for modern Indian art, and is inspired by both the simplicity of Indian folk art, and the intensity of Indian miniatures. The series juxtaposes elements of nature against a conceptual landscape, where they exist with no specific relation to each other or to time and space, but still share a significant relationship.

In the present lot, a dark, silhouetted bird is suspended above a large and flat expanse of vivid orange, while another, smaller bird in yellow floats below it. A large multi-hued mountain dominates the canvas, but adding a surrealist tinge to the work are the other two mountainous forms, the second upside down and the third seemingly strung between the first two. This yellow form and the single tree atop the first mountain also add an element of mysticism to the composition, and strongly assert Krishen Khanna’s observation that Swaminathan “…managed to dissociate common phenomena from its natural associations and lodge it as it were, in a universe of mystery and wonder, creating images which are about to reveal themselves but never quite do so” (as quoted in J. Swaminathan, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, 1995, not paginated).

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