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Lot Essay
Vasudeo S. Gaitonde’s painting from 1958 represents a landmark that epitomises the master’s enduring journey of experimentation and discovery. This painting is one of the first examples of Gaitonde’s radical shift to a fundamentally non-objective form of art. Figures and recognisable forms give way in favour of a deeper fascination with light and colour. As the critic Holland Cotter states, “He [Gaitonde] learned to use color as an independent expressive element and to break representational forms down to their abstract core. In doing so, he revealed an important historical truth: Indian painting had always been, fundamentally, about abstraction.” (H. Cotter, ‘An Indian Modernist With a Global Gaze’ The New York Times, January 2015)
This work is an antecedent to Gaitonde’s abstract landscapes from later in his career, seen in the bold expanses of colour which both literally and physically make up the building blocks for this abstract image. These blocks of colour “perform a stylistic function by organising the formal tensions in the available space and by quietly dramatising the interplay of light, texture and space.” (D. Nadkarni, Gaitonde, New Delhi, 1983, unpaginated).
Gaitonde’s compositions ofer new readings with every viewing, the layers of colour and light bubble to the surface. The colour blocks are in perfect balance but are arranged without a specific sequence or order in mind - they convey Gaitonde’s personal vocabulary. The browns, yellows, ochre and blues of this painting create harmonic synergetic symphonies. During the late 1950s, Gaitonde had a studio at the Bhulabhai Memorial Institute in Bombay among fellow painters, thespians, musicians and dancers. He thrived in this interdisciplinary environment and was very fond of Indian classical music and dance. In this exemplar of modernity, the colourful abstracted forms build and move in harmony conveying moods and thoughts similar to the beats in music and the steps of a dance sequence. However, what resonates, above all in this painting is the idea of tranquillity. In this pivotal painting, Gaitonde becomes for the first time a painter of silence.
“Everything starts from silence. The silence of the brush. The silence of the canvas. The silence of the painting knife. The painter starts by absorbing all these silences.” (P. Nandy, ‘The Forgotten Master’, The Illustrated Weekly of India, Sept 7-13, 1991)
Throughout his career, Gaitonde tested the limits of his aesthetic powers, each time coming up with provocative and unique solutions. His experimental resolve was as much in the mind as with the brush. Departing from figural representation was a monumental shift, not only in his own aesthetics but in the entire process of creating an artwork. Best described by Richard Bartholomew in 1959 as “a quiet man and a painter of the quiet reaches of the imagination” (D. Nadkarni, Gaitonde, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, 1983, unpaginated), Gaitonde was uncompromising in his belief that art, the process and the final product, is an expression of the inner self.
Gaitonde in the History of International Post-War Art
“Since abstraction is primordial to the arts of several cultures, there is no question of a single origin or a first abstraction: in this sense, abstraction was found as much as it was invented.” - Hal Foster, Art Since 1900
No other modernist Indian painter exemplifies the spirit of the international art movements of the 1950s and 1960s better than Vasudeo S. Gaitonde. The artist, who preferred to call his art non-objective, was most fittingly the focus of a major retrospective exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2014) and The Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (2015). The exhibition recognised and celebrated Gaitonde’s inimitable contributions to global modernism and transcultural abstraction.
When examining Gaitonde’s work within the broader context of international post-war art, one can draw parallels with European Modernism, German Expressionism, Abstract Expressionism and the New York School. In particular, the artists Vasily Kandinsky (1866-1944), Paul Klee (1879-1944), Nicholas de Staël (1914-1955), Adolph Gottlieb (1903-1974) and Mark Rothko (1903-1970) come to mind.
Early in his career, Paul Klee’s whimsical forms and use of line captured Gaitonde’s imagination. Commentating on Klee’s influence, the artist has stated, “Something in his use of line excited me. I gradually came to identify myself in his work. I liked Klee’s imagination and fantasy.” (F. Nissen, ‘V. S. Gaitonde — Contemporary Indian Artists 8’, Design, February 1958, unpaginated) From the mid-1950s onward there is a freedom that animates Gaitonde’s work. Having moved completely away from representational art, his paintings refect the intensity of light and the depth of colour we see every day, similar to the achievements of de Staël as exemplified in his masterpiece Composition, 1951.
On the American front, Rothko and Gottlieb, pioneers of Abstract Expressionism, both moved unequivocally from figurative to non-objective art in the 1950s, just as Giatonde did. Rothko and Gottlieb championed the abstract and believed in “[…] the simple expression of the complex thought.” Furthermore, they asserted “We wish to reassert the picture place. We are for fat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth […]” (letter to Edwards Alden Jewell, Art Editor, New York Times, 7 June 1943) The expression and search for truth culminated in Gottlieb’s Blast series from 1957-60. Cool Blast, 1960, radiates with a palpable intensity achieved through Gottlieb’s command of gesture, manipulation of colour and use of the picture plane. These elements resonate with Giatonde’s work from the same time period and are even more evident in his works from the mid-1960s onwards, following his fellowship in New York where he saw works by both artists in person for the first time.
This work is an antecedent to Gaitonde’s abstract landscapes from later in his career, seen in the bold expanses of colour which both literally and physically make up the building blocks for this abstract image. These blocks of colour “perform a stylistic function by organising the formal tensions in the available space and by quietly dramatising the interplay of light, texture and space.” (D. Nadkarni, Gaitonde, New Delhi, 1983, unpaginated).
Gaitonde’s compositions ofer new readings with every viewing, the layers of colour and light bubble to the surface. The colour blocks are in perfect balance but are arranged without a specific sequence or order in mind - they convey Gaitonde’s personal vocabulary. The browns, yellows, ochre and blues of this painting create harmonic synergetic symphonies. During the late 1950s, Gaitonde had a studio at the Bhulabhai Memorial Institute in Bombay among fellow painters, thespians, musicians and dancers. He thrived in this interdisciplinary environment and was very fond of Indian classical music and dance. In this exemplar of modernity, the colourful abstracted forms build and move in harmony conveying moods and thoughts similar to the beats in music and the steps of a dance sequence. However, what resonates, above all in this painting is the idea of tranquillity. In this pivotal painting, Gaitonde becomes for the first time a painter of silence.
“Everything starts from silence. The silence of the brush. The silence of the canvas. The silence of the painting knife. The painter starts by absorbing all these silences.” (P. Nandy, ‘The Forgotten Master’, The Illustrated Weekly of India, Sept 7-13, 1991)
Throughout his career, Gaitonde tested the limits of his aesthetic powers, each time coming up with provocative and unique solutions. His experimental resolve was as much in the mind as with the brush. Departing from figural representation was a monumental shift, not only in his own aesthetics but in the entire process of creating an artwork. Best described by Richard Bartholomew in 1959 as “a quiet man and a painter of the quiet reaches of the imagination” (D. Nadkarni, Gaitonde, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, 1983, unpaginated), Gaitonde was uncompromising in his belief that art, the process and the final product, is an expression of the inner self.
Gaitonde in the History of International Post-War Art
“Since abstraction is primordial to the arts of several cultures, there is no question of a single origin or a first abstraction: in this sense, abstraction was found as much as it was invented.” - Hal Foster, Art Since 1900
No other modernist Indian painter exemplifies the spirit of the international art movements of the 1950s and 1960s better than Vasudeo S. Gaitonde. The artist, who preferred to call his art non-objective, was most fittingly the focus of a major retrospective exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2014) and The Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (2015). The exhibition recognised and celebrated Gaitonde’s inimitable contributions to global modernism and transcultural abstraction.
When examining Gaitonde’s work within the broader context of international post-war art, one can draw parallels with European Modernism, German Expressionism, Abstract Expressionism and the New York School. In particular, the artists Vasily Kandinsky (1866-1944), Paul Klee (1879-1944), Nicholas de Staël (1914-1955), Adolph Gottlieb (1903-1974) and Mark Rothko (1903-1970) come to mind.
Early in his career, Paul Klee’s whimsical forms and use of line captured Gaitonde’s imagination. Commentating on Klee’s influence, the artist has stated, “Something in his use of line excited me. I gradually came to identify myself in his work. I liked Klee’s imagination and fantasy.” (F. Nissen, ‘V. S. Gaitonde — Contemporary Indian Artists 8’, Design, February 1958, unpaginated) From the mid-1950s onward there is a freedom that animates Gaitonde’s work. Having moved completely away from representational art, his paintings refect the intensity of light and the depth of colour we see every day, similar to the achievements of de Staël as exemplified in his masterpiece Composition, 1951.
On the American front, Rothko and Gottlieb, pioneers of Abstract Expressionism, both moved unequivocally from figurative to non-objective art in the 1950s, just as Giatonde did. Rothko and Gottlieb championed the abstract and believed in “[…] the simple expression of the complex thought.” Furthermore, they asserted “We wish to reassert the picture place. We are for fat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth […]” (letter to Edwards Alden Jewell, Art Editor, New York Times, 7 June 1943) The expression and search for truth culminated in Gottlieb’s Blast series from 1957-60. Cool Blast, 1960, radiates with a palpable intensity achieved through Gottlieb’s command of gesture, manipulation of colour and use of the picture plane. These elements resonate with Giatonde’s work from the same time period and are even more evident in his works from the mid-1960s onwards, following his fellowship in New York where he saw works by both artists in person for the first time.