Osian's Auction Catalogue India The Passionate Detachment | February 2001

ABSTACT-FIGURATIVE DILEMMA 177 158 JERAM PATEL (b.1930) a. Untitled S/d in English, l.r. Pen & Ink, 1973 54 x 72 cm. (21.3 x 28.3”) b. Untitled S/d in English, l.r. Pen & Ink, 1974 52 x 66.8 cm. (20.5 x 26.3”) Rs. 100,000 – 150,000 $ 2,130 – 3,190 (Set of 2) Refer to Flamed-Mosaic , HEART/ Mapin 1997 for illustration from similar series. Fig. 17, p50. “ The Group 1890 painters had no ideology when they revolted against the colossal entertainment industry set up by the mechano-painters of the Fifties. Some of the artists of the Group projected their art ware as products of the ‘whole’ man. Their brave attempts did not make the kind of impact they had imagined; and for the simple reasons that they had themselves been working within the system which set up such false categories as ‘advance’, ‘new’ and ‘significant’ art. What was significant in their art-making rhetorics was the belief that the writing of provincial art history through their local accents was as much an important historical constituent as building a wholly indigenous ‘engine.’ The result was the questioning attitude towards the exaggerated homages paid to the art styles created in the metropolitan centers of world art. And this was healthy way of evolving the rhetorics of indigenism.” (J.Swaminathan, 1988). “From the earliest, the collage Study in Silence of 1961 to the growth-form drawings of 1975 — the Jeram 75 and Jeram 76 series — we see one constant factor — the cryptic, enigmatic quality of the style which is non — literal, non representational but material and organic, and we see also a concern for black which heightens this. In these images of growth, of extending and expanding forms, immensely live and sinister like tumours or protoplasma which are developing, we can see attenuated heads and eyelets that suggest the pressure of the life force in them. These drawings possess a positiveness of structure and a clearly defined principle of evolving forms which is unmistakable”. (Richard Bartholomew , in LKC #34 1974 , p54). a b