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Lot 54

 

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The present lot, titled Flight, was gifted to Dr. Herbert Hartel as a personal gift by the artist during one of Hartel's excavation campaigns in India. Perhaps it held a particular appeal to Dr. Hartel because in some ways it resembles an archaeological artefact. "The works of Sehgal are indeed aesthetic artefacts; they effectively communicate his thoughts and feelings, and serve as a bridge between the artist and his audience. Sehgal's... The present lot, titled Flight, was gifted to Dr. Herbert Hartel as a personal gift by the artist during one of Hartel's excavation campaigns in India. Perhaps it held a particular appeal to Dr. Hartel because in some ways it resembles an archaeological artefact. "The works of Sehgal are indeed aesthetic artefacts; they effectively communicate his thoughts and feelings, and serve as a bridge between the artist and his audience. Sehgal's specific aesthetic purpose may be described as the intent to inform and persuade, to express through artefacts the ideas and feelings that are important to humanity." (Pran Nath Mago, "Some Consequential Contemporary Artists in India," Contemporary Art in India: A Perspective, New Delhi: National Book Trust, 2001, pp. 185-186)

Amarnath Sehgal was a poet, philosopher, artist and craftsman. Unfettered by any particular style or medium, his work is mainly informed by a need to investigate the human experience. "Sehgal observes beauty, wherever it be, regardless of time, scale or culture." (Mago, p. 185)

Dr. Herbert Hartel (1921 - 2006)

In many ways, art historian Herbert Hartel was a pioneer in the field of Indian art, both in his home country of Germany, and in India. Born in 1921 in the small town of Hoyerswerda, Hartel fought in World War II until he was seriously wounded in 1941. A few years later, he began studying Indology with Professor Ernst Waldschmidt, a renowned specialist in Indian philosophy and archaeology. After earning a PhD in the subject in 1953, Hartel joined the Ethnological Museum in the then divided West Berlin as a curator for their collection of Indian Art. He spent the next ten years painstakingly restoring their collection of art and artefacts, which had been scattered across West Germany during the war.

During this decade, he was responsible for turning the Indian Art department into a separate and independent Museum of Indian Art, which was founded in 1963 with Hartel as its director. Two year later, he introduced and taught Indian Art as a new subject at the Free University of Berlin.

In the late 1950s, Hartel undertook an eight-month long expedition to India, where he interacted with leading specialists and Indian institutions of art and archaeology. This trip later led to his own field work in archaeology in India through the support of the Deutsche Arch??ologische Gesellschaft (German Archaeological Society). During a second expedition through India In 1960, Hartel took up the initiative to set up a bureau for the German Archaeological Society. With the express task of finding a site for excavation and getting permissions to establish a bureau, he zeroed in on a dilapidated fortress in the village of Sonkh in Mathura district of Uttar Pradesh. After crossing many bureaucratic hurdles, he began his work in earnest, with funding from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation). Subsequently, from 1966 to 1974, Hartel conducted eight successive campaigns with the help of nearly 200 local workers, which unearthed numerous archaeological finds. One of these excavations included parts of a red sandstone apsidal temple, or gajaprastha, which bore reliefs carved by artists of the Mathura school, during the reign of King Kanishka I of the Kushan Empire. Some of the unearthed finds have been exhibited in India and Germany at the Berlin Museum f??r Indische Kunst, which he headed.

Hartel's interests extended to modern art as well. During his time in India, he met Modernists such as Biren De, M F Husain, Laxman Pai, and Satish Gujral, and built a collection of artworks that he bought directly from them. Some are part of the collection of the Museum of Asian Art in Berlin. The following five lots were part of Hartel's personal collection.

Hartel passed away in 2006, leaving behind a legacy of scholarship which includes the discovery and preservation of cultural heritage.

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