Gulam Rasool Santosh

Formerly in the collection of Chester and Davida Herwitz, New York
Purchased from Aicon Gallery, New York

Good overall condition, as viewed.
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In early 2013, three important paintings by Gulam Rasool Santosh—from the now legendary Chester and Davida Herwitz Collection—were featured in the groundbreaking exhibition Midnight to the Boom: Painting in India after Independenceat the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. The PEM houses the largest and most significant collection of Indian contemporary art outside of India, the majority of which were acquired in 2001, from Chester and Davida Herwitz—pioneers, tastemakers and connoisseurs in the history of modern South Asian art patronage.

The present, large-scale work titled Garhi, was originally part of the Herwitzs' personal collection. The Herwitz family deeply admired the work of Santosh, collected his paintings prodigiously, and as such, had in their collection many of the most important works by the artist. From among the works in the Herwitz’ extensive personal collection, GR Santosh and Laxma Goud were in fact the two most collected artists.Of particular interest to Chester and Davida Herwitz - per the cultural zeitgeist of the time-were Santosh's neo-Tantric works, of which they acquired numerous extraordinary examples, such as the present work.

Santosh was ‘discovered’ as a young man by none other than Sayed Haider Raza, during a visit to Kashmir in the late 1940s, through whom Santosh later joined the Progressive Artist Association in Srinagar. With the support of Raza, Santosh was shortly thereafter awarded a scholarship to attend art school in Baroda, where he trained with another well-known and highly regarded modern artist, Nariyan Shridhar Bendre, and was introduced to the larger Indian modernist movement, as well as Western art and art history. Within a decade, Santosh was a rising star and self-supporting artist with several solo and group exhibitions under his belt.

This work from 1981 is highly emblematic of Santosh’s later, geometric, neo-Tantric works. The cubistic language of GR Santosh was formed years after he had already gained recognition throughout India as a celebrated watercolorist, portraitist, figurative artist and novelist. Drawing upon the philosophical imagery of esoteric Shaivism from his native Kashmir, Santosh utilized ancient symbols of fertility such as the ‘ascending and descending triangles’—representative of male and female energy; and the circular or ovoid bindu—or generative seed element to great effect. A master colorist, Santosh’s geometric works create a spiritual architecture through which the artist was able to explore his own philosophical yearnings and inquiries.

In the artist’s own words: “Tantra helped me in visually actualizing our ancient thought process. The maithuna image constitutes two bodies, prakriti and purush, in union. To stylise the purush-prakriti union in its pure form, I pared off the head and limbs of the image. My images attained a sort of symmetry, ultimately. I had to hold back the natural progression of bilateral symmetry till the time an inner desire would well up … I understood colour as light, and that a pigment is the illusion of its colour. Thus, illusion gives the pigment surface its transparency. This means that the light-illusion defines and marks our space-illusion. There is the case of the framing margin in my work. This defines the canvas within cosmic space. I made this visual definition of an enclosure through colours.” (G.R. Santosh, et al, Awakening: A Retrospective of G.R. Santosh, New Delhi, 2011, pp. 40-42)