Osian's Auction Catalogue Indian Antiquities Modern Contemporary Fine Arts and Books | April 2017

49 K.H. Ara 1914-1985 Nude Watercolour on paper, c.1959-60 Signed in English ‘Ara’ l.l. 29.3 x 21.7 in (74.5 x 55.0 cm) Provenance Private Mumbai-based Collector; previously from the Zeba & Ruxana Pathan Family Collection INR 600,000 – 900,000 USD 8,960 – 13,430 ‘What was the raison d’etre for Ara nudes? He drew from several sources but his commitment was to modernism and everything was grist to the mill of painterly language. He was not involved with the anatomy of the figure nor with forms of realism. He was seeking a means of extending his language in colour, form and composition and the nudes became an important component of this. Moving away from the raw, jagged strokes of his still life paintings, he began to exercise a cool restraint, evenly spreading his colour on the canvas… One is reminded of Matisse, who, even while painting nudes, never lost sight of the pictorial construction of the picture space to which his subjects had to conform.’ – Yashodhara Dalmia rpt in The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives. New Delhi OUP 2001; p139. “By the 1960s, Ara’s painterly vocabularly had turned its course to include yet another classic modernist form – the nude. Most of them were massive bodies…The folds of flesh rarely arouse any tenderness or even titillation. Indeed, if anything, they create a feeling of a spreading largeness that can take over the entire picture space…The massive bodies do not ripple with muscular tension but are perfectly still, like still life objects.” – Yashodhara Dalmia, rpt. in The Making of Modern Indian Art: the progressives, OUP, 2001, p135. ‘With all its various facets, his work has a pervading quality of totality and unity… there is a total grasp of each of his subjects and their moods, a total imaginative creation of reality which is so persuasive that people from all walks of life, from the simple and innocent to the sophisticated and refined, appreciate it without effort. Herein lies the secret of Ara’s success which is, in this semi-desert that is called art life in India, quite unique and spectacular. This unity is not only a technical one expressed in terms of composition and correlation but one of vision and sensibility.’ – Rudi Von Leyden rpt. in Marg Vol.VI, No.2 1953; p52-5. 104 | Osian’s–Connoisseurs of Art