Important Notice

Jagdish Swaminathan’s artistic philosophy challenged both the revivalist ideals of the Bengal School and the assumption that Indian modernism had to derive its visual language from Europe. Instead, he sought the foundations of a distinctly Indian modernism in indigenous systems of image-making. These ideas first found expression in the early 1960s, when Swaminathan developed a visual vocabulary derived from cave paintings, totemic signs and folk... Jagdish Swaminathan’s artistic philosophy challenged both the revivalist ideals of the Bengal School and the assumption that Indian modernism had to derive its visual language from Europe. Instead, he sought the foundations of a distinctly Indian modernism in indigenous systems of image-making. These ideas first found expression in the early 1960s, when Swaminathan developed a visual vocabulary derived from cave paintings, totemic signs and folk imagery. Rather than constructing narratives, he assembled symbols whose meanings remained open- ended. Writing on this period, Geeta Kapur observed that his paintings “...drew upon the collective assemblage of myths and symbols in folk, and other subterranean passages of culture that attempted to reach the unknown in a kind of blind intuitiveness... The whole became a composition of non-descriptive, only partially associative images, combined with ‘automatic writing’, darkly painted upon dark surfaces, appearing as if they were being seen at the end of a dark passage in a temple.” (Geeta Kapur, “Reaching Out to the Part”, Lalit Kala Contemporary 40, New Delhi: Lalit Kala Akademi, 1995, p. 17)

During his honeymoon in Betul, Madhya Pradesh, a few years earlier in 1955, Swaminathan had witnessed a young boy being treated by a tribal healer after a snake bite. Recalling the incident he wrote, “We watched in rapt fascination and soon enough the boy recovered and the snake, which had been imprisoned in an earthen pot, was let off and disappeared into a thick bamboo grove. This early encounter with tribal life was to have a deep impact on my later life.” (Jagdish Swaminathan, “The Cygan: An Auto-Bio Note”, Lalit Kala Contemporary 40, New Delhi: Lalit Kala Akademi, 1995, p. 9)

That early experience acquired renewed significance in the 1980s when Swaminathan established the Roopankar Museum of Art at Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal, dedicated to tribal, folk and contemporary art. His sustained contact with tribal communities prompted what he described as a return to his artistic beginnings. “Madhya Pradesh also brought about a basic shift in my painting again. The live and vibrant contact with tribal cultures triggered off my natural bent for the primeval, and I started on a new phase recalling my work of the early sixties. If my work of the early sixties anticipated the journey of the eighties, my present phase recapitulates my beginnings.” (Swaminathan, p. 13)

Works such as the present lot demonstrate Swaminathan’s effort to place folk, tribal and contemporary practices within a shared artistic continuum. Here he adopts a more instinctive mode of image-making informed by tribal wall paintings and mark-making. The composition brings together birds, geometric forms, gestural strokes, and letters that appear at once deliberate and spontaneous. As Gayatri Sinha has noted, these canvases employ combinations of “...pre-iconographic symbols like the lotus, the sun, the square and triangle, the lingam, the swastika,” placing emphasis on “primal Indian symbols and their contemporary relevance, on indigenous abstraction, and the free surface treatment of the canvas.” (Gayatri Sinha, India: Contemporary Art from Northeastern Private Collections, Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, 2002, p. 117)

Rather than functioning as fixed emblems, these motifs become capable of generating multiple associations. To Swaminathan they possessed what he described as a “magical” rather than ritual significance. “The arrangement of geometric forms generates memory associations whose roots are in the racial, collective psyche... The introduction of the representational context in terms of colour geometry gives birth to psycho-symbolic connotations. Thus a mountain remains not a mountain but becomes the abode of Shiva. It becomes a totem capable of exercising its magical eternal influence on who come within its field of vision.” (Jagdish Swaminathan, “The Cube and the Rectangle” Lalit Kala Contemporary 40, New Delhi: Lalit Kala Akademi, 1995, pp. 22–23)

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