Important Notice

I n 1927 as the first batch of students at the State Art School, Indore, sat and painted in their object drawing class, the professor D D Deolalikar noticed a young boy rendering the objects in shades that no one else had picked up on. He held up Narayan Shridhar Bendre’s work up to the class and proclaimed, “This boy is going to be a great colourist.” (Ram Chatterji, Bendré: The Painter and The Person, Mumbai: The Bendre Foundation for Art and... I n 1927 as the first batch of students at the State Art School, Indore, sat and painted in their object drawing class, the professor D D Deolalikar noticed a young boy rendering the objects in shades that no one else had picked up on. He held up Narayan Shridhar Bendre’s work up to the class and proclaimed, “This boy is going to be a great colourist.” (Ram Chatterji, Bendré: The Painter and The Person, Mumbai: The Bendre Foundation for Art and Culture & Indus Corporation, 1990, p. 1)

This generous statement from a teacher like Deolalikar—prophetically acknowledging Bendre’s brilliance even as a young student—accurately predicted the art career that was to come and its impact on Indian art at large. In 1948, following his solo show in New York, Bendre became an associate of the Progressive Artists’ Group in Bombay and began exploring how he could distill the Western traditions of Cubism, Expressionism and abstraction into a language of art that was rooted in Indian formalism and distinctly his own.

In this work we see a sombre yet serene composition of three birds perched in a landscape of windy shadows with fervent brushstrokes of creamy whites, blues and ochres making up the background. One can see the immense care with which Bendre engages with form and space on the surface of the canvas, and the way he sublimates the essence of the natural world around him into an aesthetic work harmoniously composed. Bendre talked about how nature and the worldly experiences that came with travelling and exploring all that is around him inspired his art, “I belong to this earth. I walk on this earth. I eat on this earth, and I don’t think of anything but this earth. Things here are like a library to me. I’m not interested in anything else. Because of this, I don’t create dream paintings. Whatever I have experienced in this world, I paint.” (The artist quoted in Chatterji, p. 64)

As an artist Bendre wanted to share the pleasure and calming peace that painting instilled in him and through works like this one, that celebrate and quietly present the tender moments of life that quickly flit by, he gives the viewer a chance to feel that pleasure as well.

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