Important Notice

“The artist has to use the power of colour and form to suggest a certain indescribable spirit. It should be suggested, not painted.”
— AKBAR PADAMSEE

Akbar Padamsee’s artistic practice was driven by intellectual rigour and an inquiring, relentlessly creative mind. For over six decades he alternated between figuration and landscapes, using each genre as a means to experiment with colour, space, and form, and to explore the nature... “The artist has to use the power of colour and form to suggest a certain indescribable spirit. It should be suggested, not painted.”
— AKBAR PADAMSEE

Akbar Padamsee’s artistic practice was driven by intellectual rigour and an inquiring, relentlessly creative mind. For over six decades he alternated between figuration and landscapes, using each genre as a means to experiment with colour, space, and form, and to explore the nature of temporality and human consciousness. Landscapes emerged as a dominant theme in his work in the late 1950s, and during the following decade, which was one of his most creatively fertile, he gradually moved away from empirical representation towards a more conceptual vision. As art historian and curator Beth Citron notes, “Throughout the 1950s and early ’60s, Padamsee travelled between the cosmopolitan centres of Paris and Bombay… Absorbing diverse visual terrains across India and Europe, and, beginning in 1963, of North America too, Padamsee began exploring landscape painting as a genre…In spite of (or perhaps because of) spending the 1960s transiting among urban hubs in three continents, imaginative natural landscapes became one of Padamsee’s central artistic projects during that decade.” (Beth Citron, “Akbar Padamsee’s Artistic ‘Landscape’ of the ’60s”, Bhanumati Padamsee and Annapurna Garimella eds., Akbar Padamsee: Work in Language, Mumbai: Marg Publications and Pundole Art Gallery, 2010, p. 195)

Padamsee’s landscapes from the mid- to late-1960s are integral forerunners to the idealised, luminous archetypal landscapes or Metascapes that would define his practice from the 1970s onwards. Describing the nature of these works after 1963, the author Shamlal writes that the artist “leaves the human form alone and takes to contemplation of nature. In fact to call it contemplation of nature is itself a hyperbole. There are already hints at a new kind of silence which comes with the realization of the nothingness at the heart of things. The objects get lost in a sort of haze as words get lost in a melody.” (Shamlal, “Padamsee”, Bhanumati Padamsee and Annapurna Garimella eds., Akbar Padamsee: Work in Language, Mumbai: Marg Publications and Pundole Art Gallery, 2010, p. 324)

Paintings such as the present lot represent the artist’s stylistic shift away from the primacy of line towards using colour as the structural element of a painting. While his earlier landscapes featured discernible architectural forms, here he constructs semi-abstract visions of the natural world through rich colour fields in a muted palette of blues and browns, applied in textured layers of thick impasto. One notices traces of the monochromes from his earlier Grey Works coexisting with the early indication of the fuller colour palette that would emerge in his later, brighter landscapes. He abandons the notions of perspective that are traditionally associated with landscape as a genre and allows the vestigial forms of mountains, earth, and sky to merge into each other. Through his careful manipulation of colour, texture, and light, the forms appear to move and shift, revealing to the viewer a scene that is simultaneously real and imaginary.

Unlike conventional landscapes, such paintings have few defining features and go beyond the specifics of time and place. Citron notes, “Never subsumed by wispy trees, romantic sunsets, or the limitations of conventional geography, Padamsee’s landscapes often transcended the representation of specific sites and physically accurate settings. Rather than an intent to describe the natural world per se, the artist’s object was the total conceptual and metaphysical ken of his visual environment, with his paintings impressing an immediate perceptual experience that relied on expression and sensation rather than realist recognition.” (Citron, p. 195) Padamsee has further explained the poetic ambiguity in his interpretation of nature saying, “I’m not interested in location or landscape. My general theme is nature-mountains, trees, water, the elements, and obviously one is influenced by the environment but I’m not interested in painting Rajasthan or the desert of whatever. When I paint a tree, a mountain, or a river, I am really interested in “the river”, “the mountain”, “the tree”. The paintings are neither abstract nor representational.” (Artist quoted in Citron, p. 214)

Padamsee’s vast unpeopled landscapes resonate with a deep silence through which the artist seems to draw the viewer towards the infinite. This sensibility may reflect his own solitary temperament-during the first four years after moving to Paris in 1951, he led an introspective life, keeping to himself while quietly absorbing the cultural and artistic environment of postwar Europe. Critic Geeta Kapur observes, “The conception of Akbar’s paintings begins from a position of uncompromised solitude, and even though in the process of formation they acquire a sensuous magnitude, the remoteness from the viewer is deliberately maintained. Whether he paints a deeply withdrawn portrait or a landscape, the distance the image leaves in its wake becomes a step towards the infinite. It is this attempt to include the infinite within pictorial space that induces him to multiply the distances-between himself and the object, between the viewer and the painted image, between the image and the model—and the sum total of these distances makes up the conspicuous structure of his paintings.” (Geeta Kapur, “Akbar Padamsee - The Other Side of Solitude”, Contemporary Indian Artists, New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House Pvt Ltd, 1978, p. 99) This ability to balance solitude and intellect with energy and emotional depth is central to what sets Padamsee’s practice apart in the history of Indian modernism.

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