Important Notice

The present lot is among the rare few surviving works from V S Gaitonde’s brief figural phase during the nascent years of his career following his graduation from Bombay’s J J School of Art in 1948. It comes from the collection of Avinash Chopra, a close friend of the artist to whom Gaitonde gifted it early in his career. Although Mr Chopra joined the J J School of Art after Gaitonde had completed his diploma, he regularly encountered him... The present lot is among the rare few surviving works from V S Gaitonde’s brief figural phase during the nascent years of his career following his graduation from Bombay’s J J School of Art in 1948. It comes from the collection of Avinash Chopra, a close friend of the artist to whom Gaitonde gifted it early in his career. Although Mr Chopra joined the J J School of Art after Gaitonde had completed his diploma, he regularly encountered him alongside K H Ara and M F Husain at exhibitions and at the Artist Aid Guild, of which they were all members.

The work not only offers insight into Gaitonde’s early artistic concerns but also occupies a crucial place in his transition from representational imagery to abstraction, which later cemented his reputation as one of India’s foremost modernists. Notably, it reflects the influence of Indian miniature painting, apparent in its compact format and flattened perspective. The fisherwomen are shown in profile and rendered in a highly stylised manner, with careful attention to structure and posture. At the J J School of Art, Gaitonde’s interest in classical Indian painting techniques was encouraged by his professor Jagannath Ahivasi and his fellow student Shankar Palsikar.

His fluid line reveals him to be a gifted draughtsman, even though he would abandon figuration altogether in favour of pure abstraction, or “non-objectivity,” by 1958. Gaitonde developed an admiration for Paul Klee, particularly after attending a lecture on the artist by Akbar Padamsee at art school. The lyrical quality of Klee’s line and colour resonated with his own emerging visual language, evident in this painting. He explained, “Rather than saying I was influenced by Paul Klee, it should be said that I was drawn to the wondrous forms, colour combinations, beauty of line drawing in his work.” (Artist quoted in Menezes, p. 86)

Gaitonde was also, as Dnynaneshwar Nadkarni observes, “experimenting with painting itself” at this time. His painterly handling of pigment reveals an early exploration of the emotive potential of colour, texture, and light and a concern with establishing a “meaningful relationship between line and painted surface.” (Dnyaneshwar Nadkarni, Gaitonde, New Delhi: Lalit Kala Akademi, 1983) In the artist’s own words, “Early on, I did both figurative and non-figurative paintings. I was initially influenced by Indian miniatures. You see, my sense of colour was weak, so I started copying the miniatures. Their vivid, vital, vibrant colours attracted me. Soon, to study the colours more closely, I started eliminating the figures and just saw the proportions of colours, movements. I just took patterns instead. I think that step really marked the beginning of my interest and pre-occupation in [non-objective] painting.” (Artist quoted in Menezes, p. 99)

Together, the precision of his line and the expressiveness of his colour anticipate a painterly approach that balanced spontaneity and intuition with structure and deliberation- principles that would continue to govern his art throughout his career. These early experiments with line and colour would eventually chart a path towards his non-representational visual vocabulary. As he has explained, “I excluded the figures in the miniatures and learned to retain only the proportion, the composition sense, the combination of colours and the feeling. Perhaps that was my initiation into modern painting.” (Artist quoted in Menezes, p. 54)

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