Important Notice

Akbar Padamsee Paysage (1961)

Padamsee painted Paysage in 1961, after returning from a sojourn in Paris during the '50s. The setting suggests a scene from the French countryside, but the artist meanders around pinpointing the scene to any specific location. Padamsee abandons the use of perspective and instead places each structure above the other, circumventing the need for a horizon line. Executed using a palette... Akbar Padamsee Paysage (1961)

Padamsee painted Paysage in 1961, after returning from a sojourn in Paris during the '50s. The setting suggests a scene from the French countryside, but the artist meanders around pinpointing the scene to any specific location. Padamsee abandons the use of perspective and instead places each structure above the other, circumventing the need for a horizon line. Executed using a palette knife, the structures appear to emerge from a tinted background. Homes set against a midnight blue take form through swatches of colour: umber layered over orange, white over ochre, sepia over back.

The present lot is an outstanding example of Padamsee's investigations into the role and interplay of form, light and colour through studies of village scenes. His landscapes of the '60s are vivid renderings built using layers of colour, but depart from the legacy of the School of Paris. This work demonstrates a rigorous and disciplined approach to building up the scene, plane by plane, and yet, it is suffused with colour and vibrancy. Literary critic and journalist Shamlal states that, "His method is quite contrary to that of the expressionists who use colour directly to express the turbulence or violence of their emotions without subjecting it to any discipline. In Padamsee's work colour is always subordinate to a structural basis. The texture of the paintings done in this period is by no means a superfluous detail; it is part of the meaning of the picture." (Shamlal, "Akbar Padamsee", Padamsee, Sadanga Series on Modern and Contemporary Indian Art, Vakils Publications, Mumbai, p. 8)

Shamlal further observes that with his work from the early 1960s, "It is always the composition of planes and colours which give form to what Padamsee has to say. This becomes all the more clear in his paintings of 1961 and 1962...It is not only the richer design of these paintings but their more mellow use of colour which distinguishes them from Padamsee's earlier work." (Shamlal, p. 8)

Padamsee's style defies classification; he always discovered and mastered new ways to express himself. In her essay on Padamsee's landscapes, curator Beth Citron of the Rubin Museum of Art, New York, skirts classification by observing that "individual houses [were] reduced to opaque squares and triangles, even as the composite image would remain referential and legible as a landscape" ("Akbar Padamsee's Artistic "Landscape" of the '60s", Akbar Padamsee: Work in Language, Marg Publications and Pundole Art Gallery, Mumbai, 2010, p. 197).

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