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Lot Essay
There is no place for thought in the process of painting. Your entire body and mind reach a state of equilibrium […] the paint and the canvas meet in a union in one brief moment.
- Vasudeo S. Gaitonde
Vasudeo Santu Gaitonde is India’s most celebrated abstract artist, whose work has been exhibited to international acclaim in landmark institutional retrospectives at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, in 2014-16. Gaitonde’s deeply contemplative canvases, with their rich fields of color punctuated only by subtle variations in texture and color, are instantly recognizable. The present lot, an exquisite example from 1963 with an almost-square format, is anchored by the artist’s signature use of hovering horizon lines, which have become iconic within his oeuvre.
There arguably is no single decade more significant in the development of Gaitonde’s mature style than the 1960s. As the critic Dnyaneshwar Nadkarni wrote, it is in “[…] the sixties we find him [Gaitonde] already poised for the most meaningful achievements of his career. In every way it was a decisively revolutionary thrust forward” (D. Nadkarni, Gaitonde, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, 1983, unpaginated). Painted a year before the artist’s famous trip to New York in 1964 on a Rockefeller Fund Fellowship, the present lot embodies Nadkarni’s sentiment. Much is rightly made of the impact of the artist’s experiences and influences in New York, none more so than his encounters with Abstract Expressionism and Conceptualism. However, as this Untitled example illustrates, these influences fine-tuned rather than revolutionized Gaitonde’s own established aesthetic and artistic process.
The process of creating Gaitonde’s mesmerizing artwork was all-consuming, both of mind and body. For the artist, the physical act of painting his canvases was meticulous and precise but, fundamentally, it was the final stage of a method that was as much spiritual as physical. An uncompromising artist of great integrity, Gaitonde distanced himself from anything he deemed superfluous to the contemplative rigour he believed his art required. So time consuming was Gaitonde’s process, that he only completed five or six canvases a year.
The decade of Gaitonde’s career leading up to the period when the present canvas was painted was characterized by his profound search for a non-objective visual vocabulary. In his own words, "Early on, I did both figurative and non-figurative paintings; I was initially influenced by Indian miniatures [...] I started eliminating the figures and just saw the proportions of colours. I experimented with this because sometimes figures can bind you, restrict your movements. I just took patterns instead. I think that step really marked the beginning of my interest and pre-occupation in this area of painting” (Artist statement, M. Lahiri, Patriot, 27 September 1985).
Gaitonde graduated from the Sir J.J. School of Art in Bombay in 1948, and quickly associated himself with the seminal modernist collective, the Progressive Artists’ Group there. However, it was not long before Gaitonde turned to a more solitary path as artist and philosopher, distinguishing himself from his contemporaries by abandoning figuration and entirely embraced non-objective art that centered color and light rather than figure and narrative. As critic Holland Cotter noted, “[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, 1 January 2015).
In the present lot, with its deep horizon rendered in masterful chiaroscuro, Gaitonde displays his exceptional manipulation of light and shadow. Like Rorschach inkblot drawings, the forms depicted in rich blue, white and black impasto seem to appear and disappear from our consciousness of their own volition. Gaitonde’s meticulous treatment of the pigment using roller and palette knife is unmistakable, layering, adding and taking away color to give the painting a sense of fathomless depth. As with all his paintings, there is no title, yet there is a strong sense of a nightscape over a calm sea. The multiple horizons in greens, greys and blacks, with their segments of rippling color, anchor the gaze in an almost meditative revelry.
In perfect harmony with Eastern and Western traditions, Gaitonde’s painting also bears strong affinity with the works of the Chinese modernist painter, Zao Wou-Ki (1920-2013). Both artists evoke a sense of landscape in their works, and the kind of nature that appears in their paintings stems from their subconscious creating landscapes of dreams. Through careful use of light and shadow, form and space, movement and rest, both Gaitonde and Zao Wou-Ki rediscover the traditional notion that the energy of life is expressed by suggesting rather than merely reproducing a subject.
The present painting reverberates with a sense of irreverent calm as swaths of dark greens and greys are broken up by iridescent pools of light. There is an inexplicable monumentality that far exceeds the limits of the canvas, whereby this painting becomes a window into a stream of consciousness as Gaitonde takes the viewer to an entirely non-objective realm. This is a magnificent and rare masterpiece of meditation and represents a cornerstone moment in Gaitonde’s oeuvre demanding contemplation and veneration in equal measure.
Zen Buddhism remained a constant thread in Gaitonde’s practice, particularly later in his career with his use of calligraphic elements. However, the spirituality of the present work also encapsulates the artist’s affinity with Zen. “It was not that he [Gaitonde] discovered Zen but there was an inevitable meeting between a way of thinking and a mind continuously exploring its relationship with the external world” (D. Nadkarni, Gaitonde, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, 1983, unpaginated).
- Vasudeo S. Gaitonde
Vasudeo Santu Gaitonde is India’s most celebrated abstract artist, whose work has been exhibited to international acclaim in landmark institutional retrospectives at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, in 2014-16. Gaitonde’s deeply contemplative canvases, with their rich fields of color punctuated only by subtle variations in texture and color, are instantly recognizable. The present lot, an exquisite example from 1963 with an almost-square format, is anchored by the artist’s signature use of hovering horizon lines, which have become iconic within his oeuvre.
There arguably is no single decade more significant in the development of Gaitonde’s mature style than the 1960s. As the critic Dnyaneshwar Nadkarni wrote, it is in “[…] the sixties we find him [Gaitonde] already poised for the most meaningful achievements of his career. In every way it was a decisively revolutionary thrust forward” (D. Nadkarni, Gaitonde, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, 1983, unpaginated). Painted a year before the artist’s famous trip to New York in 1964 on a Rockefeller Fund Fellowship, the present lot embodies Nadkarni’s sentiment. Much is rightly made of the impact of the artist’s experiences and influences in New York, none more so than his encounters with Abstract Expressionism and Conceptualism. However, as this Untitled example illustrates, these influences fine-tuned rather than revolutionized Gaitonde’s own established aesthetic and artistic process.
The process of creating Gaitonde’s mesmerizing artwork was all-consuming, both of mind and body. For the artist, the physical act of painting his canvases was meticulous and precise but, fundamentally, it was the final stage of a method that was as much spiritual as physical. An uncompromising artist of great integrity, Gaitonde distanced himself from anything he deemed superfluous to the contemplative rigour he believed his art required. So time consuming was Gaitonde’s process, that he only completed five or six canvases a year.
The decade of Gaitonde’s career leading up to the period when the present canvas was painted was characterized by his profound search for a non-objective visual vocabulary. In his own words, "Early on, I did both figurative and non-figurative paintings; I was initially influenced by Indian miniatures [...] I started eliminating the figures and just saw the proportions of colours. I experimented with this because sometimes figures can bind you, restrict your movements. I just took patterns instead. I think that step really marked the beginning of my interest and pre-occupation in this area of painting” (Artist statement, M. Lahiri, Patriot, 27 September 1985).
Gaitonde graduated from the Sir J.J. School of Art in Bombay in 1948, and quickly associated himself with the seminal modernist collective, the Progressive Artists’ Group there. However, it was not long before Gaitonde turned to a more solitary path as artist and philosopher, distinguishing himself from his contemporaries by abandoning figuration and entirely embraced non-objective art that centered color and light rather than figure and narrative. As critic Holland Cotter noted, “[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, 1 January 2015).
In the present lot, with its deep horizon rendered in masterful chiaroscuro, Gaitonde displays his exceptional manipulation of light and shadow. Like Rorschach inkblot drawings, the forms depicted in rich blue, white and black impasto seem to appear and disappear from our consciousness of their own volition. Gaitonde’s meticulous treatment of the pigment using roller and palette knife is unmistakable, layering, adding and taking away color to give the painting a sense of fathomless depth. As with all his paintings, there is no title, yet there is a strong sense of a nightscape over a calm sea. The multiple horizons in greens, greys and blacks, with their segments of rippling color, anchor the gaze in an almost meditative revelry.
In perfect harmony with Eastern and Western traditions, Gaitonde’s painting also bears strong affinity with the works of the Chinese modernist painter, Zao Wou-Ki (1920-2013). Both artists evoke a sense of landscape in their works, and the kind of nature that appears in their paintings stems from their subconscious creating landscapes of dreams. Through careful use of light and shadow, form and space, movement and rest, both Gaitonde and Zao Wou-Ki rediscover the traditional notion that the energy of life is expressed by suggesting rather than merely reproducing a subject.
The present painting reverberates with a sense of irreverent calm as swaths of dark greens and greys are broken up by iridescent pools of light. There is an inexplicable monumentality that far exceeds the limits of the canvas, whereby this painting becomes a window into a stream of consciousness as Gaitonde takes the viewer to an entirely non-objective realm. This is a magnificent and rare masterpiece of meditation and represents a cornerstone moment in Gaitonde’s oeuvre demanding contemplation and veneration in equal measure.
Zen Buddhism remained a constant thread in Gaitonde’s practice, particularly later in his career with his use of calligraphic elements. However, the spirituality of the present work also encapsulates the artist’s affinity with Zen. “It was not that he [Gaitonde] discovered Zen but there was an inevitable meeting between a way of thinking and a mind continuously exploring its relationship with the external world” (D. Nadkarni, Gaitonde, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, 1983, unpaginated).