Important Notice

The present lot was painted in 1962, which saw the culmination of the Cubist idiom that Sabavala had explored for a decade since his return from Paris. Titled Down To A Sunless Sea, Sabavala borrows a line from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's famous poem Kubla Khan. The poem, conceived by Coleridge supposedly in an opium-induced dream, describes the landscape of Xanadu, the capital city in the kingdom of Kublai Khan, a great Mongolian... The present lot was painted in 1962, which saw the culmination of the Cubist idiom that Sabavala had explored for a decade since his return from Paris. Titled Down To A Sunless Sea, Sabavala borrows a line from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's famous poem Kubla Khan. The poem, conceived by Coleridge supposedly in an opium-induced dream, describes the landscape of Xanadu, the capital city in the kingdom of Kublai Khan, a great Mongolian emperor in the 13th century. In Kublai Khan's walled kingdom, flows the river Alph, running through dark caverns and down to the lifeless sea:

"In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round;
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery."

The poem further expands on the tumultuous aspect of nature from which the river is born, contrasting it with the serene, constructed garden of Kublai Khan's domed palace. Using vivid imagery, Coleridge paints a fantastical landscape alluding to the power of intense imagination and creativity, which come together beautifully in the utopian Xanadu.

The present lot is quite likely Sabavala's pictorial (and metaphorical) interpretation of this poem which presents the imagery of the sunny dome, the icy caves and the tempestuous river in Sabavala's own unique interpretation of the Cubist idiom. In the artist's landscapes in the early 60s, "Man lives and floats in a far more extended and larger world than we normally envisage." (Artist quoted in Ranjit Hoskote, Pilgrim, Exile, Sorcerer: The Painterly Evolution of Jehangir Sabavala, Mumbai: Eminence Designs Pvt. Ltd., 1998, p. 92) As he broke away from Cubist formalism, the sharp angularities of Sabavala's paintings softened and became multi-faceted, made sublime by strokes of illumination. According to the poet Adil Jussawala, "The bleached light Sabavala presents us so frequently is the Indian light, honestly recorded, and I will admit that it is only after seeing Sabavala's paintings that I have been struck by qualities in the light which I would not otherwise have appreciated. But, as a whole, the landscape in each painting appears to be governed by a force that exists not in the objective landscape but in the painter himself... Its origins lie, I think, in literature, in the poetry of spiritual desolation, of purgatory, of the after-life, and of angst." (As quoted in Hoskote, pp. 90-91)

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