Akbar Padamsee (b. 1928)

Good overall condition. Some superficial staning to canvas at center. Two minor chips to paint along upper edge.
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The current work, Untitled (Cityscape), executed in 1961, is a classic example of an early landscape by Akbar Padamsee. Untitled (Cityscape) presents a moment of transition between the artist’s early experimentation with the Grey works of the late 1950s and the more abstracted landscapes and cityscapes of the 1960s, marked with Padamsee’s bold use of color. 

Beth Citron explains: “[Following a solo exhibition in Bombay in 1960], Padamsee returned to Paris in 1961. At this time, he began an earnest investigation of light, color and form through village landscape studies, following a classically French tradition that included artists from Lorrain and Corot to Cézanne. Works of 1961-62 … depict flattened rows of houses tucked quietly into town settings.

“In these works, realistic representations of specific places and individual architectural elements give way to layered, expressive renderings of the countryside. Through these studies, Padamsee began to develop his own distinct idiom for the popular language of German-inspired expressionism, with individual houses and churches reduced to opaque squares and triangles, even as the composite image would remain referential and legible as a landscape,” (Citron, “Akbar Padamsee’s Artistic Landscape of the 60s”, Akbar Padamsee: Work in Language, Mumbai, 2010, pp. 196-97).

Visible in the current work are the variegated tones of grey of which Padamsee made such detailed studies throughout the late 1950s in Bombay. The terracotta roofs of the clustered buildings stand in contrast to the darkened sky in grey tones, reminiscent of early examples of autochrome photography. Within the current work we see the basic architecture of Padamsee’s later Metascapes from 1970s and later.