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Lot Essay
Born in Indore in 1910, Narayan Shridhar Bendre was a pioneering modern Indian painter as well as an influential teacher and mentor to several well-known Indian artists. Bendre’s initial exposure to art and art education was at the newly founded State Art School in Indore, where he was part of its inaugural class. As a student there, he was taught that the close observation of nature, rather than theories memorized from books, was the best way to learn how to paint. Students “were taught to observe the behaviour of light at different hours of the day and night and were made to work even in the light of the hurricane lanterns they carried [...] This was their introduction to an impressionistic palette that almost discarded black. They also became conscious of the fact that line did not exist in nature – it was an invention of the artist for the purpose of delineating form” (R. Chatterji, Bendre: The Painter and the Person, Singapore, 1990, p. 8).
After travelling around the country, completing a Government Diploma in Art in Bombay, and winning admiration and prizes for his early work, Bendre embarked on a career as an educator and arts administrator at Maharaja Sayajirao University in Baroda in 1950. Apart from teaching, he served as Head of the Painting Department there, and then as Dean of Faculty from 1959. It was in Baroda that the artist veered away from the strictures of Academic Realism, championing the modernist idioms of Post-Impressionism, Expressionism and Cubism instead, after encountering these styles in the museums he visited on his travels to the United States and Europe. “He felt convinced representation was not the ultimate goal for an artist. Emphasis had to be laid on ultra-sensorial factors. To achieve this, it was essential to arrive at an integration of all forms, an inter-relation of chosen elements. And for this, distortion was essential – no movement or action was possible without it” (R. Chatterji, Ibid., p. 41).
After retiring from teaching in 1966, Bendre left Baroda and returned to Bombay, where he would live for the rest of his life. The present lot, painted in 1974, reflects both his early study of nature and light as well as the keen understanding of international artistic styles and subjects he honed later. A delicate rendering of blue-purple Morning Glory flowers on a vine in the pale pink light of dawn, this painting draws on the restraint and subtlety of traditional Japanese and Chinese works of art as well as the long history of portraying these flowers as symbols of young and sometimes fleeting love. Bendre’s elegant interpretation of the subject in this lot adds to a significant body of work by renowned artists and designers across genres, eras and continents, including Katsushika Hokusai, Utagawa Hiroshige, Qi Baishi, Georgia O’Keefe, Donald Sultan, Joel Arthur Rosenthal (JAR), Jean Schlumberger, Louis Tiffany, Sopheap Pich, Ansel Adams and the master painters of the Dutch Golden Age.
After travelling around the country, completing a Government Diploma in Art in Bombay, and winning admiration and prizes for his early work, Bendre embarked on a career as an educator and arts administrator at Maharaja Sayajirao University in Baroda in 1950. Apart from teaching, he served as Head of the Painting Department there, and then as Dean of Faculty from 1959. It was in Baroda that the artist veered away from the strictures of Academic Realism, championing the modernist idioms of Post-Impressionism, Expressionism and Cubism instead, after encountering these styles in the museums he visited on his travels to the United States and Europe. “He felt convinced representation was not the ultimate goal for an artist. Emphasis had to be laid on ultra-sensorial factors. To achieve this, it was essential to arrive at an integration of all forms, an inter-relation of chosen elements. And for this, distortion was essential – no movement or action was possible without it” (R. Chatterji, Ibid., p. 41).
After retiring from teaching in 1966, Bendre left Baroda and returned to Bombay, where he would live for the rest of his life. The present lot, painted in 1974, reflects both his early study of nature and light as well as the keen understanding of international artistic styles and subjects he honed later. A delicate rendering of blue-purple Morning Glory flowers on a vine in the pale pink light of dawn, this painting draws on the restraint and subtlety of traditional Japanese and Chinese works of art as well as the long history of portraying these flowers as symbols of young and sometimes fleeting love. Bendre’s elegant interpretation of the subject in this lot adds to a significant body of work by renowned artists and designers across genres, eras and continents, including Katsushika Hokusai, Utagawa Hiroshige, Qi Baishi, Georgia O’Keefe, Donald Sultan, Joel Arthur Rosenthal (JAR), Jean Schlumberger, Louis Tiffany, Sopheap Pich, Ansel Adams and the master painters of the Dutch Golden Age.