Important Notice

As a result of his decade long tenure as Founder and Director of the Roopanker Museum at Bharat Bhavan in Bhopal, Jagdish Swaminathan gained a deep knowledge and appreciation of tribal art, particularly that of Central India. "Madhya Pradesh also brought about a basic shift in my painting again. The live and vibrant contact with tribal cultures triggered off my natural bent for the primeval, and I started on a new phase recalling my work of the... As a result of his decade long tenure as Founder and Director of the Roopanker Museum at Bharat Bhavan in Bhopal, Jagdish Swaminathan gained a deep knowledge and appreciation of tribal art, particularly that of Central India. "Madhya Pradesh also brought about a basic shift in my painting again. The live and vibrant contact with tribal cultures triggered off my natural bent for the primeval, and I started on a new phase recalling my work of the early sixties. If my work of the early sixties anticipated the journey of the eighties, my present phase recapitulates my beginnings. As sixty five, it is full circle or is it?" (Jagdish Swaminathan, "The Cygan: An Auto-bio Note", Lalit Kala Contemporary 40, New Delhi, March 1995, p. 13).

Swaminathan "???was fascinated by the manner in which tribal perceptions created symbolic forms???Significantly, the paintings of the last phase of his life were concerned with the passage of a sign on its way to becoming a symbol. A symbol by its very nature is a means of communication sometimes of very complex ideas and it assumes a commonality of understanding between the maker and the receiver. In the case of Swami's paintings the marks made with intentions and equally those which just happened to get there by virtue of the process, do not create symbols in the sense I have mentioned, but the completed painting is itself symbolic of the act of painting itself" (Krishen Khanna, J. Swaminathan, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, 1995, unpaginated).

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