Important Notice

K H Ara's entry and success into the Indian art world has been described as nothing short of "astonishing" by art critics and historians. Born to a Dalit bus driver in a village in Andhra Pradesh, Ara ran away to Bombay at the age of seven, began working as a car cleaner, and eventually discovered he could paint. Using an apropos metaphor for the still life paintings that Ara eventually became famous for, critic Jagmohan compares the artist's... K H Ara's entry and success into the Indian art world has been described as nothing short of "astonishing" by art critics and historians. Born to a Dalit bus driver in a village in Andhra Pradesh, Ara ran away to Bombay at the age of seven, began working as a car cleaner, and eventually discovered he could paint. Using an apropos metaphor for the still life paintings that Ara eventually became famous for, critic Jagmohan compares the artist's evolution as a painter to "a flowering plant that manages to shoot out from under the boulder to tantalize us with its colours. For in spite of the socio-economic burden of his people and his initial venture as a car cleaner, he emerged as a self-taught painter who had dazzled the eyes of innumerable people with his colourful, imaginative, expressionist paintings." (Quoted in Yashodhara Dalmia, The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2001, p. 131)

The present lot is likely among Ara's early works from the 1940s, when he painted compositions based on human studies or everyday situations in society. Depicting a group of men, perhaps labourers, huddled around in a circle playing cards, this work is characteristic of Ara's style and subjects from this decade, which included "fishing trawlers, men and women at wedding receptions, and horse-riders..." that were abound with a "certain amount of vitality." (Dalmia, p. 129)

As such, the present lot and similar paintings from this period - including Untitled (Beggars), circa 1940s, and Bharata Natya, circa 1945, which were exhibited at the landmark international show The Progressive Revolution: Modern Art for a New India at the Asia Society Museum in New York in 2018 - convey Ara's deep and abiding sense of humanism. "As eclectic and raw as his painterly forms were, they were at the same time authentic to his inner striving... what could be evidenced was a penchant for compositions that drew from the quick of life, the raw edge as it were." (Dalmia, p. 130)

Ara's paintings of this period were, in many ways, a socio-political commentary of sorts, that captured the pulse of a newly independent India - a sentiment that was shared by his contemporaries and fellow co-founders of the Bombay- based Progressive Artists' Group. In the immediate aftermath of Independence, artists such as M F Husain, Ram Kumar and Krishen Khanna were drawn towards capturing the prevailing atmosphere of political and economic uncertainty. In their individual forms of expression, they chose subjects that ranged from figures of alienated youth in urban spaces, to those of peasants and migrant labours who were symbolic of both the traditional and the modern.

"In their strong thrust toward modernism, the Progressive artists took historical reality into account and found a means of assimilating it into the present. In doing so, they stepped into the difficult terrain of Indian art, where folk art, the Miniature schools, the Company school, and an eclectic mixture of western naturalism coexisted. From this medley of styles they created their own mode of expression, and, in coming together despite their different backgrounds, the PAG also inadvertently symbolized the transcendence of divisions created by religion, region and caste." (Yashodhara Dalmia, "The Rise of Modern Art and the Progressives," Z ehra Jumabhoy and Boon Hui Tan, The Progressive Revolution: Modern Art for a New India, New York: Asia Society Museum, 2018, p. 30)

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