Important Notice

"I don't paint forms, forms emerge from the dynamism of movement." - AKBAR PADAMSEE

After graduating from the J J School of Art in 1951, Akbar Padamsee spent the 1950s and 1960s travelling extensively between Bombay and Paris. In France, he absorbed himself in his surroundings, frequenting libraries, galleries and museums, and became acquainted with notable names from the art world, such as Man Ray and Alberto Giacometti. While the... "I don't paint forms, forms emerge from the dynamism of movement." - AKBAR PADAMSEE

After graduating from the J J School of Art in 1951, Akbar Padamsee spent the 1950s and 1960s travelling extensively between Bombay and Paris. In France, he absorbed himself in his surroundings, frequenting libraries, galleries and museums, and became acquainted with notable names from the art world, such as Man Ray and Alberto Giacometti. While the artist largely produced figurative works in the 1950s, his travels across different terrains in Europe inspired a transition to landscapes by the end of the decade. He remarked, “One of the reasons why I have chosen the landscape in preference to the figure is because there are many more things in terms of scale, colour, and form that I can use here… I should be able to use the boundaries of the figure, but somehow when confronted with it, I feel I should deposit everything in its right place that ultimately forms the face, which is not so with the landscape.” (Yashodhara Dalmia, “Akbar Padamsee,” Journeys: Four Generations of Indian Artists in Their Own Words ? Volume I, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011, p. 114)

As art critic Beth Citron notes, at the start of the 1960s, Padamsee “began an earnest investigation of light, colour and form through village landscape studies, following a classically French tradition that included artists from Lorrain and Corot to Cezanne.” (Beth Citron, “Akbar Padamsee’s Artistic Landscapes of the ‘60s,” Bhanumati Padamsee and Annapurna Garimella eds., Akbar Padamsee: Work in Language, Mumbai: Marg Publications and Pundole Art Gallery, 2010, p. 197) In a 1960 solo exhibition held at Jehangir Art Gallery in Bombay, the artist displayed a series of early landscapes, among which were depictions of cities with architectural elements rendered in geometric and cubist forms. In contrast, the present lot from 1961 is painted in an expressionist style that indicates a transition from landscapes with recognisable architectural forms to the richly hued, abstracted compositions of his Metascapes in the 1970s.

Executed using a palette knife, the structures in the present lot take form through swatches of colour. One notices the remnants of the monochromes from his earlier Grey Works coinciding with an early indication of the fuller colour palette that would emerge in his subsequent Metascapes. “In an epiphanic exploration of sepia in Paysage Urbain, Padamsee creates the distilled cityscape with houses and streets covered in tinted shades. Even while receding from palpable reality, the ochre, green and brown, which shower into the sky, evoke the city at dusk.” (Yashodhara Dalmia, “Modernism Reinvented in Bombay: The Art of the Progressives,” Rob Dean, Giles Tillotson eds.,Modern Indian Painting: Jane & Kito de Boer Collection, Ahmedabad: Mapin Publishing, 2019, p. 137)

Padamsee may have been inspired by scenes from France and Southern Europe, but his landscapes contain few defining features and transcend the notions of time and space. He regarded nature with objectivity, restructuring it to give it an aesthetic form. “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.” (Citron, p. 195)

Though he moved from figuration to abstraction, Padamsee’s interest in structure remained throughout his career. The present lot is thus an example of the artist’s keen ability to balance the formal and emotional with an exactitude that contributes to the singularity of his work. “It is always the composition of planes and colours which give form to what Padamsee has to say. This becomes all the more clear in his paintings of 1961 and 1962. 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.” (Sham Lal, “Akbar Padamsee,” Padamsee: Sadanga Series on Modern and Contemporary Indian Art, Mumbai: Vakils Publications, p. 8)

Read More
Artist Profile
Other works of this artist in: this auction  |  entire site