Important Notice

Jagdish Swaminathan conceived of painting as a realm in which the visible and the conceptual continuously inform one another. As he wrote, “The mind moves through the object to the idea, and through the idea to the object. Thus, the work becomes concrete and abstract at the same time.” (Jagdish Swaminathan, “The Traditional Numen and Contemporary Art”, Lalit Kala Contemporary, No. 29, April 1980, p. 11). This philosophy finds articulation... Jagdish Swaminathan conceived of painting as a realm in which the visible and the conceptual continuously inform one another. As he wrote, “The mind moves through the object to the idea, and through the idea to the object. Thus, the work becomes concrete and abstract at the same time.” (Jagdish Swaminathan, “The Traditional Numen and Contemporary Art”, Lalit Kala Contemporary, No. 29, April 1980, p. 11). This philosophy finds articulation in his celebrated Bird, Mountain, Tree series, to which the present lot belongs.

Executed over more than two decades, from the late 1960s onwards, these works revolve around three recurring titular motifs arranged in various permutations across expansive, unmodulated colour fields to create sparse otherworldly landscapes. These compositions reveal affinities with Pahari and Kangra miniature painting-seen in the flat expanses of saturated pigment, the fine detailing of the bird and mountain, and the division of the picture plane capped with a band at the top in the present lot. The tree in this work, however, is rendered not as a naturalistic form but as a rectangular block interrupted by the reflection of the bird.

Swaminathan was deeply invested in the folk and tribal traditions of Central India and incorporated their totemic symbolism and adapted aspects of their indigenous techniques in his early practice. While he employs recognisable images in his Bird Mountain Tree series, he severs these forms from empirical reality, presenting them instead as archetypal presences with perspective and scale deliberately distorted. Artist Krishen Khanna notes, “His structures were elemental, uniquely his own. He conjugated them to create undreamt images. Hills, birds, insects, plants, water, air, unbuildable buildings but no human beings... The arena of painting was its own unique universe in which the impossible is credible. A rock suspended in mid-air with a sleek bird atop of it, a mountain reflected in a lake which leaves you guessing as to which is which, and steps on a monument leading nowhere. The entire drama enacted in the richest and most unusual colours.” (Krishen Khanna, J Swaminathan: Contemporary Indian Art Series, New Delhi: Lalit Kala Akademi, 1995)

Such stylistic choices align with Swaminathan’s broader artistic convictions. A fiercely independent painter, writer, and political thinker, he sought to redefine the trajectory of Indian modernism. He rejected the idea that it developed solely through engagement with the West, as well as the “pastoral idealism of the Bengal School.” (Group 1890 Manifesto, Transits of a Wholetimer J Swaminathan: Years 1950–69, New Delhi: Gallery Espace, 2012, p. 70). For him, modern art had become excessively tethered to the material world when what animated a painting was not narrative or didactic content but an elusive poetic force, a quality that is unmistakably evident in this painting.

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