Jagdish Swaminathan (1929-1994)

In August 1962, Swaminathan founded Group 1890.  The manifesto of the Group evidently written by Swaminathan, was an attack on the 'vulgar naturalism' and the  'pastoral idealism' of the Bengal School and the 'hybrid mannerism' of European modernism. The manifesto urged artists to see phenomena in their 'virginal state'.  Swaminathan's canvases from the 1960s can be seen as his personal search for the virginal state in art. 'His perception of this virginal state of phenomena he tried out in his paintings, creating an alternative pictorial space in dividing purely conceptual landscapes in bright color fields on which appeared mountains, stretches of water trees, diagonally levitating stones with an archetypal bird form. Painted with captivating simplicity his paintings explored the pictorial possibilities of his limited imagery which were emblematic of elements necessary for man's survival on earth and interpretatively the numerous permutations and combinations of the imagery and bright colours suggested the ascent of man's inner being leaving the gross and the sullied.'  (J. Swaminathan, 20th Century Museum of Contemporary Indian Art, presented online by Vadehra Art Gallery).

The first and last exhibition of Group 1890 held in 1963 was introduced by the famous Mexican poet and ambassador to India Octavio Paz, who was hugely influential to Swaminathan. In 1966, Swamianthan published the monthly magazine, Contra in collaboration with Paz challenging the prevailing views of modernity through polemical articles on art and aesthetics.  Swaminathan wrote, 'Octavio is one of those rare geniuses, (who) have the power of devising the submerged intelligence in you and then listening to him is the experience in self-discovery.'  Likewise Octavio Paz wrote the following poem 'to his friend Swaminathan, the painter'.

'The eye explodes
Fountain of signs
The serpentine undulation moves
Wave upon wave of imminent apparitions
The canvas a body
Dressed in its own naked enigma'

The current owner, worked as a diplomat in Mexico in the 1970s and was a personal friend of Octavio Paz and lent this work titled 'Maun Gaman' or ' the Departure of Silence' to an exhibition that Paz organized.