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

64 THE PASSIONATE DETACHMENT 23 SAILOZ MOOKHERJEA (1907 — 60) National Art Treasure Landscape Signed in English, l.r. Watercolour, mid 1950s 122 x 91 cm. (48.0 x 35.8”) Rs. 500,000 - 600,000 Non-Exportable Item “ His paintings though not many in number are important as harbingers of the new attitude towards painting and the “art about art” of the mid-twentieth century…Sailoz has to be considered one of the major figures in modern Indian art. In the 1940’s he did indeed enjoy a reputation and popularity few Indian artists have since been able to rival... Sailoz was proud to be an artist. There is a cold impersonality and ambiguity in modern art from which his work was free. His painting was vibrant and positive, clearly a result of his convictions and temperament; he rejected disappointment and difficulties. He was a man with the soul of a pilgrim, the hand of the artist, the eye of a poet.”(Jaya Appasamy, rpt. in LKA Monograph 1966 ).