Important Notice

“All true art, and tribal art specifically, is visionary. It is through art that the tyranny of the senses is overcome and the terror of the unknown transcended.”
– JAGDISH SWAMINATHAN

From the beginning of his artistic career in the 1950s, Jagdish Swaminathan questioned and rejected the notion that Indian modernism developed from encounters with the West. His concern was the creation of a truly Indian modern art by turning... “All true art, and tribal art specifically, is visionary. It is through art that the tyranny of the senses is overcome and the terror of the unknown transcended.”
– JAGDISH SWAMINATHAN

From the beginning of his artistic career in the 1950s, Jagdish Swaminathan questioned and rejected the notion that Indian modernism developed from encounters with the West. His concern was the creation of a truly Indian modern art by turning inward and looking at the nation’s own folk and indigenous art traditions.

For Swaminathan, the “...significant issue was how to free the self, the individual artist, from the ‘clammy embrace of the senses and rise to something a little more conceptually dignified’? Moving away from this self-referentiality (especially the pre-independence artistic conventions) Swaminathan argued for representation of the so far unrepresentable with a desire to perhaps circle it with full blooded philosophical modernism – a theoretical proposition supported by a body of work which would then project its own referent marks leaving no trace of external determinations so that art as pure sublime will cause its own origin and death.” (Amit Mukhopadhyay, “Editorial,” Lalit Kala Contemporary 40, New Delhi: Lalit Kala Akademi, 1995, p. 4)

The present lot, executed in the 1960s, reflects this early phase of Swaminathan’s oeuvre, during which he turned to the symbology of ancient cave paintings, totemic symbols from early societies, and indigenous Indian art forms in a quest to simplify, to find the origins and to return to purity. “Swaminathan used a range of symbols like the lotus, sun, lingam, swastika, and snake. He simulated the informal manner in which these symbols had been used in folk and tribal art - scratching the canvas and slapping it with his hand dipped in paint. Though symbols taken out of their original context lose their meaning, they helped Swaminathan formulate a personalized indigenous pictorial language.” (Amrita Jhaveri, A Guide to 101 Modern & Contemporary Indian Artists, Mumbai: India Book House, p. 92)

Writing about this initial period of his oeuvre, critic Geeta Kapur notes that Swaminathan’s paintings “...drew upon the collective assemblage of myths and symbols in folk, and other subterranean passages of culture that attempted to reach the unknown in a kind of blind intuitiveness. The borrowed image held a certain amount of intrinsic power; the rest he wishes to infuse by the particular confluence of elements on the picture plane. The whole became a composition of non-descriptive, only partially associative images, combined with ‘automatic writing’, darkly painted upon dark surfaces, appearing as if they were being seen at the end of a dark passage in a temple” (Geeta Kapur, “Reaching out to the part”, Lalit Kala Contemporary 40, p. 17)

While his continual experiments with painterly techniques would eventually lead him to his acclaimed ‘Bird, Mountain, Tree’ series (lot 35) in the same decade, Swaminathan returned to and refined his earlier obsession with tribal and folk art in the 1980s, following his founding of the Roopanker Museum of Art at Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal at the invitation of the government of Madhya Pradesh.

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