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Lot Essay
Through the 1950s and early 60s, Akbar Padamsee moved back and forth between India and France, absorbing as many aesthetic and philosophical stimuli as he could, and developing his early work in unique, thought-provoking directions. Although his first solo exhibition was held in Bombay in 1954, the artist returned to Paris on several occasions after this. For him, the French capital was a crucible for his creativity offering him the opportunity to view great works of art in person and directly interact with artists like Man Ray, Constantin Brancusi and Alberto Giacometti. In 1960, following a second acclaimed solo exhibition of monumental monochromatic paintings in Bombay (see lot 211), Padamsee once again returned to Paris, where he would depart from his gray palette to portray rural and urban French landscapes.
Describing this period of Padamsee’s work, Beth Citron notes, “At this time, he began an earnest investigation of light, colour, and form through village landscape studies, following a classically French tradition that included Lorrain and Corot to Cézanne [...] Through these studies, Padamsee began to develop his own distinct idiom [...] with individual houses and churches reduced to opaque squares and triangles, even as the composite images would remain referential and legible as a landscape [...] skeletons of bustling crowded settlements (like Rouen) as of those sites hollowed of houses where large swathes of colour intimate a densely thick atmosphere.” (B. Citron, ‘Akbar Padamsee's Artistic “Landscape” of the 1960s’, Akbar Padamsee, Work in Language, Mumbai, 2010 pp. 195-197)
In this painting from 1962, the artist’s use of warm, golden hues and masses of architectonic forms evokes a largely experiential and sensory experience of a French town. Additionally, as in most of his work across genres, this painting seems to negotiate the dual forces of essence and substance, or as Ranjit Hoskote describes it, the ‘mythic’ and the ‘material’. “Akbar Padamsee's ground lies on the border, the fluid border between the world of myth and the world of history. In his iconography and his ideology [...] he secures for himself a particular interpretation of the complex and not-easily-encapsulated relation of content to form. For him, content usually connotes the mythic, the archetypal, and thus by definition, the immutably determined basic factors: the couple, the land/earth, the sun and moon, the city/settlement, the erect male, the poised female. As against this, form holds the terrors and doubts of history – with his material and his handling, Padamsee evokes questions and disturbances, brings an awareness of otherness to bear upon the self-regarding monumentality of his conceptions.” (R. Hoskote, Akbar Padamsee: Between the Heiratic and the Human, New Delhi, 1992, not paginated)
This painting was acquired by Elinor Kahn Kamath (1915-1992), during her stay in Paris as a freelance writer, after having served in research positions at Stanford University, the United Nations and the World Health Organization in America and Europe. At the time, her husband the author, journalist and Padma Bhushan recipient M.V. Kamath (1921-2014), was editor of The Sunday Times. Later, in Paris, Geneva, Washington, New York and Mumbai, he would serve as correspondent for The Times of India, editor of the Illustrated Weekly of India and chairman of the public broadcaster Prasar Bharati.
Describing this period of Padamsee’s work, Beth Citron notes, “At this time, he began an earnest investigation of light, colour, and form through village landscape studies, following a classically French tradition that included Lorrain and Corot to Cézanne [...] Through these studies, Padamsee began to develop his own distinct idiom [...] with individual houses and churches reduced to opaque squares and triangles, even as the composite images would remain referential and legible as a landscape [...] skeletons of bustling crowded settlements (like Rouen) as of those sites hollowed of houses where large swathes of colour intimate a densely thick atmosphere.” (B. Citron, ‘Akbar Padamsee's Artistic “Landscape” of the 1960s’, Akbar Padamsee, Work in Language, Mumbai, 2010 pp. 195-197)
In this painting from 1962, the artist’s use of warm, golden hues and masses of architectonic forms evokes a largely experiential and sensory experience of a French town. Additionally, as in most of his work across genres, this painting seems to negotiate the dual forces of essence and substance, or as Ranjit Hoskote describes it, the ‘mythic’ and the ‘material’. “Akbar Padamsee's ground lies on the border, the fluid border between the world of myth and the world of history. In his iconography and his ideology [...] he secures for himself a particular interpretation of the complex and not-easily-encapsulated relation of content to form. For him, content usually connotes the mythic, the archetypal, and thus by definition, the immutably determined basic factors: the couple, the land/earth, the sun and moon, the city/settlement, the erect male, the poised female. As against this, form holds the terrors and doubts of history – with his material and his handling, Padamsee evokes questions and disturbances, brings an awareness of otherness to bear upon the self-regarding monumentality of his conceptions.” (R. Hoskote, Akbar Padamsee: Between the Heiratic and the Human, New Delhi, 1992, not paginated)
This painting was acquired by Elinor Kahn Kamath (1915-1992), during her stay in Paris as a freelance writer, after having served in research positions at Stanford University, the United Nations and the World Health Organization in America and Europe. At the time, her husband the author, journalist and Padma Bhushan recipient M.V. Kamath (1921-2014), was editor of The Sunday Times. Later, in Paris, Geneva, Washington, New York and Mumbai, he would serve as correspondent for The Times of India, editor of the Illustrated Weekly of India and chairman of the public broadcaster Prasar Bharati.