Jehangir Sabavala

Acquired from Pundole Art Gallery, Mumbai, circa 1977

Minor loss in canvas consistant with nail on stretcher in the lower left corner. There is a minor surface scuff on the left of the canvas. This work is in good condition as viewed.
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Jehangir Sabavala’s oeuvre was unlike that of any other Indian artist practising during the Modernist era. Educated at notable institutions in Mumbai, London and Paris, Sabavala returned to India in the 1950s and combined his formal technical skills with inspiration drawn from the vibrant Indian landscape to produce an awe-inspiring body of works.

Over the decades, there were notable shifts in the style and subject matter of Sabavala’s paintings. From the geometric and tightly ordered Cubist compositions of the late 1950s to the semi-Cubist abstractions of the mid-1960s, Sabavala’s paintings of the 1970s reflect spaciousness and a loosening of formal order. His paintings started to focus on the luminosity of colour, the varied effects of multiple tones and the rendering of spatial dimensions through the gradation of light. The sky and the sea also begin to dominate the subject matter of Sabavala’s canvases from this time period. Sabavala explained the shift in his idiom in a letter to Ranjit Hoskote, “I seem more drawn to the sea and sky of the western seaboard and to the ridges and dunes of our desert areas. To the arid wastes of Rajasthan where all is adobe-coloured, and the land and sky merge into one, but no focal point is ever lost.” (R. Hoskote, The Crucible of Painting: The Art of Jehangir Sabavala, Bombay, 2005, p. 112). These words neatly sum up the essence of this painting. The restrained hues of ochre and azure are masterfully combined so that the land and sky are inseparable, only connected by the snaking body of water through the barren landscape. Painted in 1977, this work utilizes the artist's characteristic subdued palette which defines these visionary, ethereal landscapes.

Sabavala had stated his preference for the “still, solitary world of the bare landscape, within which man, if present, is a notation…” (ibid, p.125) and it is interesting to note that this work adheres to this penchant of his, where the presence of man has not been completely removed from the painting, but instead plays a supporting role in the minute sporadic clusters of boats along the river. Painted from an aerial perspective, this work offers the viewer a glimpse of a landscape through Sabavala’s eyes.