Osian's Auction Catalogue Select Masterpieces of Indian Modern and Contemporary Art | June 2009

78 This piece discusses the collection of 16 Lots, part of Select Masterpieces of Indian Modern and Contemporary Art auction. These works of art reflect the conceptual as well as visual journey of post- independence Indian art through till the contemporary, through the specific genre of landscapes, cityscapes and city-interiors. The assimilation of international modernism in the artistic axioms of Indian artists is one of the important features of the post-independence art scene. These attempts by Indian artists (specifically the Progressives and their successors) can be potentially explored and studied beyond just a “play of texture and creation of planar structures”. In the post-colonial vogue, the artists’ recourse to a western visual language can be seen through many lenses. Conscious negation of the ‘national’ in the works of F. N. Souza, S. H. Raza, Akbar Padamsee, Ramkumar & Avinash Chandra in the 1950s when they traveled to Paris, and their systemic identification with the global consciousness can be seen through Franz Fanon’s theory (of a native traveling to the mother country / western horizon). They could either obliterate any reference to the “Indian” and become slaves of international formalism and produce stereotyped works, or parcel themselves by including “Indianness”, and claim a different dominion which would have implied running against the grain. Sailoz Mookherjea’s ‘Palms in Landscape’ is a mixture of the swiftness and immediacy of the folk arts and the romantic modernist approach to colour, annotating impressions of the real. As a teacher at Sarda Ukil Art School in Delhi, Mookherjea had been a major influence on many artists. Further, the structured cities of Raza, Padamsee and Ramkumar of the fifties and early sixties, are monotonous cubicles, the maze-like rigid spaces only offering confinements of a defined social existence. In their early works, figures appear in a strenuous relationship with the backdrop. The possibility of a dialogue is broken as they configure as separate entities. The City as backdrop is oppressive with its high structures, grids and routines while the painted figure is numbed and caught in the maze. The human figure is static, usually enjoying an iconic stature in the picture space but ironically resonating their uniconic / ordinary existence. Secure in their contours, defined bodies, their insecurities are reflected through their relationship with the space they inhabit, such as in Santosh’s ‘Kashmir’ or Akbar’s poised human figures from his Prophets series and his female nudes and couples, or Ramkumar’s “sad” people. However, when the figure is removed, the cityscape acquires a cumbersome existence. These ‘scapes’ are further distanced from the ‘sense of belonging’, as the flattened approach to colour heightens the element of absence or “lack” of sentimentality. There is no romanticism. The objectivity is heightened to erase the platforms of identification. These uncomfortable zones are inhabitable places. These are perhaps strategies to shift focus to the asocial aspects of the city, its seductions and far-end cries. The pictorial surface is jagged by the monotonous yet colourful structures of rising but desolate buildings such as Akbar Padamsee’s ‘Horizon IV’, S. H. Raza’s ‘Village series’, reminiscent of the geometric composition of the famous work Omkareshwar (1948) by H. A. Gade. Ramkumar’s ‘Varanasi series’ comes after his disaffiliation with politics (he was politically active in France, and was part of the circle of French communists), and the figures in his works have been eliminated. The melancholy of his early works is usurped by the pictorial structure of the cityscape; the objective treatment of Banaras without sentimentality. The difference could be viewed as dealing with portraits of two cities – the industrial city (as represented by the scapes in his early works of the fifties), and the eternal city of Banaras. To use Richard Bartholomew’s phrase he was representing “condensed history” in Banaras. The relationship between man and the city gets more complicated with the absence of the human, and the structural remnants of its presence in the holy city of purgation. His later abstract landscapes of the late sixties and seventies fuse in a nostalgic yearning with objectivity. Amidst the hope of a new India – a new nation, a civil society – the city grew through structures of hope, employment for the poor, with all seductions and lure of luxury offered at the cost of the fragility of human life. Distancing themselves from the turmoil of the nation-building task which was at the helm during Landscapes, cityscapes and interiors, & the locked human figure