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Lot Essay
Over the past several years, vivid colour and an extroverted expression of the senses have disappeared from my canvases. I have been seduced by a palette of broken tones … by a visible search for a more distilled essence. I think that so much more can be said by the half-tone than by the blatancy of primary colour … I prefer to haunt a mysterious world of veiled lights and sudden discoveries.
- Jehangir Sabavala
It was during the early 1960s, a period of intense clarification in Jehangir Sabavala’s work, that the artist defined and focused the language that would make his paintings “visionary landscapes” and “site[s] of epiphany” that transcended common genres and motifs. Describing this change, the artist’s biographer Ranjit Hoskote notes, “Between 1961 and 1964, Sabavala attempted to break away from the suffocating formality of Synthetic Cubism; and in this, he found a remedial alternative in the work of Lyonel Feininger […The artist notes,] ‘Through Feininger’s pure, precise and yet very delicate and personal renderings of cloud and boat and sea, I discovered the joys of extending form into the beauty and clarity of light. I became interested in the source of light, its direction, its effect. Through these experiments, gradually, my work changed’” (R. Hoskote, The Crucible of Painting: The Art of Jehangir Sabavala, Mumbai, 2005, p. 89, 95).
The present lot, painted in 1966, is evocatively titled In the Ambush of a Calm. Sabavala painstakingly constructs sea and sky here using subtly graded horizontal bands of color, separated by just the hint of a distant horizon. This isolated seascape appears to be portrayed at dusk, moments after the sun has dipped below the skyline, leaving dissipating wisps of pale pink clouds reflected in a bluish-violet band of still water. The artist’s expression of the very precise qualities of light and atmosphere through a nuanced palette, which effortlessly negotiates entire families of tones and micro-tones, conjures a vista that is at once restrained and emotionally charged. As Sabavala suggests, this calm is not a tranquil one, but as treacherous as any storm, marooning two sailboats in the absence of wind and waves. Bobbing motionless on the water, their destination, a craggy coast with the suggestion of a blinking lighthouse, lies frustratingly out of reach in the distance.
In addition to Feininger, Sabavala’s luminescent seascapes from the mid-1960s, with their diffused light and burnished layers of translucent paint, also pay homage to J.M.W. Turner and Caspar David Friedrich, whose work the artist greatly admired. Writing about this period in Sabavala’s oeuvre, Hoskote notes, “At the level of immediate sensation, we are struck by the obvious physical beauty of the painting as product, process and parallel reality. And as we enter Sabavala’s spaces, with trepidation, to inhabit them, we apprehend their disquieting melancholy and their restful tranquility; the paradox underscores the artist’s uncertainty about his place in the universe, his exploration of an infinity that can be measured only in mirages, illuminated only through mystery” (R. Hoskote, Ibid., 2005, p. 109). Sabavala extended his exploration of the nuanced aspects of this tranquility over the course of his career in seascapes including Cloud-bank (1967), Unruffled Calm (1970), Brooding Calm (1979) and Aquamarine Ultramarine (1996).
- Jehangir Sabavala
It was during the early 1960s, a period of intense clarification in Jehangir Sabavala’s work, that the artist defined and focused the language that would make his paintings “visionary landscapes” and “site[s] of epiphany” that transcended common genres and motifs. Describing this change, the artist’s biographer Ranjit Hoskote notes, “Between 1961 and 1964, Sabavala attempted to break away from the suffocating formality of Synthetic Cubism; and in this, he found a remedial alternative in the work of Lyonel Feininger […The artist notes,] ‘Through Feininger’s pure, precise and yet very delicate and personal renderings of cloud and boat and sea, I discovered the joys of extending form into the beauty and clarity of light. I became interested in the source of light, its direction, its effect. Through these experiments, gradually, my work changed’” (R. Hoskote, The Crucible of Painting: The Art of Jehangir Sabavala, Mumbai, 2005, p. 89, 95).
The present lot, painted in 1966, is evocatively titled In the Ambush of a Calm. Sabavala painstakingly constructs sea and sky here using subtly graded horizontal bands of color, separated by just the hint of a distant horizon. This isolated seascape appears to be portrayed at dusk, moments after the sun has dipped below the skyline, leaving dissipating wisps of pale pink clouds reflected in a bluish-violet band of still water. The artist’s expression of the very precise qualities of light and atmosphere through a nuanced palette, which effortlessly negotiates entire families of tones and micro-tones, conjures a vista that is at once restrained and emotionally charged. As Sabavala suggests, this calm is not a tranquil one, but as treacherous as any storm, marooning two sailboats in the absence of wind and waves. Bobbing motionless on the water, their destination, a craggy coast with the suggestion of a blinking lighthouse, lies frustratingly out of reach in the distance.
In addition to Feininger, Sabavala’s luminescent seascapes from the mid-1960s, with their diffused light and burnished layers of translucent paint, also pay homage to J.M.W. Turner and Caspar David Friedrich, whose work the artist greatly admired. Writing about this period in Sabavala’s oeuvre, Hoskote notes, “At the level of immediate sensation, we are struck by the obvious physical beauty of the painting as product, process and parallel reality. And as we enter Sabavala’s spaces, with trepidation, to inhabit them, we apprehend their disquieting melancholy and their restful tranquility; the paradox underscores the artist’s uncertainty about his place in the universe, his exploration of an infinity that can be measured only in mirages, illuminated only through mystery” (R. Hoskote, Ibid., 2005, p. 109). Sabavala extended his exploration of the nuanced aspects of this tranquility over the course of his career in seascapes including Cloud-bank (1967), Unruffled Calm (1970), Brooding Calm (1979) and Aquamarine Ultramarine (1996).