Important Notice

In 1963, Jagdish Swaminathan founded Group 1890, an artists’ collective whose manifesto rejected the academic, nationalist, and pastoral leanings of both the Paris and Bengal schools of painting in favour of the simple yet important lessons learned from the classical and folk arts of India. As the artist once explained, “…painting was never meant to ‘represent’ reality in the naturalistic ‘objective’ sense; it was the cogent and poetic rendering... In 1963, Jagdish Swaminathan founded Group 1890, an artists’ collective whose manifesto rejected the academic, nationalist, and pastoral leanings of both the Paris and Bengal schools of painting in favour of the simple yet important lessons learned from the classical and folk arts of India. As the artist once explained, “…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” (as quoted in Back to the Future: 1989-2005, Gallery Espace exhibition catalogue, New Delhi, 2006, not paginated).

An attempt at this return to traditional, simple and clean representation is evident in the present lot, one of the vivid, conceptual landscapes from the artist’s ‘Bird, Mountain and Tree’ series. Here, suspended against a vast orange-yellow expanse, are two finely detailed free-floating mountains, the larger sporting a lone tree, and a bird frozen in mid-flight between the two. Inspired by Pahari miniature paintings, the artist employs flat planes of bright colour, meticulous detailing, and vertical bands on each side of the surface that frame and limit the image. The bird, captured in an upward trajectory, is perhaps symbolic of the artist’s own aspirations to rise above the ordinary by ‘reincarnating’ the Numenous image and to “…retrieve world painting from the rut of the analytical blind alley, and…remove painting from the realm of drawing room decoration to its fundamental icon-function” (as quoted in “The Cube and the Rectangle”, Lalit Kala Contemporary 40, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, 1995, p. 21).

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