Important Notice

“In contradiction to the Western approach, the traditional Indian approach to painting-space has always been geometric. This, because painting was never meant to represent reality in the naturalistic, objective sense, it was the cogent and poetic rendering of an ideal truth in terms of two-dimensional space…The reincarnation of the numinous image will retrieve world painting from the rut of the analytical blind alley, and its palpable presence... “In contradiction to the Western approach, the traditional Indian approach to painting-space has always been geometric. This, because painting was never meant to represent reality in the naturalistic, objective sense, it was the cogent and poetic rendering of an ideal truth in terms of two-dimensional space…The reincarnation of the numinous image will retrieve world painting from the rut of the analytical blind alley, and its palpable presence will remove painting from the realm of drawing room decoration to its fundamental icon-function” (as quoted in The Margi & the Desi: Between Tradition and Modernity, Gallery Espace exhibition catalogue, New Delhi, 2004, not paginated).

In his ‘Bird, Tree and Mountain’ series of works, Jagdish Swaminathan consciously rejected the academic romanticism of the Bengal School as well as similar movements in modern European art, particularly the Ecole de Paris, calling instead for a return to the representation of nature and its phenomena in their ‘virginal state’. Symbolic of an ascent out of the sullied world of the man-made into a more tranquil existence, the present lot represents a movement away from the Western ideals that, in Swaminathan’s opinion, dominated modern Indian art.

Swaminathan “…talked and wrote about the importance of the numenous image at a time when most artists were dealing with phenomena. He emphatically stated again and again that the obsession with the phenomenal world was Western and no matter how elegant and efficient its art, it was too self-evident and immersed in the practical day-to-day – nor did he think that the manner in which it was painted could retrieve it. By the very nature of its concerns it failed to gain access to the regions of mystery which were central to Art. He had little patience with narrative and didactic paintings no matter how well they were painted. For him they lacked the mysterious realms of poetry” (Krishen Khanna, J. Swaminathan, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, 1995, not paginated).

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