Akbar Padamsee (b.1928)

Acquired directly from the artist in 1954 by Professor Nicolas Gyenes, a patron of the arts who lived in Paris during the 1950s and 60s

Given to the current owner in 1968 before Professor Gyenes left Paris for Canada

B. Padamsee and A. Garimella ed., Akbar Padamsee, Work in Language, Marg Publications in association with Pundole Art Gallery, Mumbai, 2010, p. 72 illus.

This work has recently been cleaned, consolidated and varnished, and is in good overall condition, as viewed. There is minor rubbing, and creasing particularly along the edges of the work, where the board touches the frame. There is a minor area of board missing in the upper right hand corner which has been filled in by the restorer, but is only visible upon close inspection.
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Head was painted soon after Padamsee's arrival in Paris where he was exposed to the art of the European modern masters as well as more primitive forms of art. 'In those early years his routine consisted of museum visits, a daily confabulation with Raza, and chance meetings with greats from the Parisian art world. This inadvertent but exceptional art education honed his idiom.' (A. Mehta,"The inherent lightness of being", Akbar Padamsee, Work in Language. B. Padamsee and A. Garimella ed., Marg Publications in association with Pundole Art Gallery, Mumbai, 2010, p.120).

Padamsee's treatment of the subject displays similarities with the portraits that Francis Newton Souza was producing at the same period. During this period both artists chose to depict isolated figures that dominated the picture plane, their subjects were neither engaged nor separated from the empty space that surrounded them. Their three-quarter length frontal stances and direct gazes addressed both the viewer and beyond. Like Souza, Padamsee's figures were bordered by a strong black outline and were often dressed in abstract patterned robes that drew on both primitive and religious sources. 'Padamsee's early figures, done in the 1950s, were almost iconic in their rigid, frontal stances and the thickly contoured angularity of the bodies. These stiffly erect, archaic forms evoked a feeling of distant obeisance to cult images rather than any human interaction.' (Y. Dalmia, The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2001, p.213).

In this painting, Padamsee's textural application of paint and the two-dimenstional composition is a reminder of the flat painted surface. However there is still a solidity and sculptural quality to Head that recalls the plasticity of ancient Indian sculpture. In this composition his subject possesses the distinctive circular eyes, also seen in Padamsee's famous work Woman with bird from the same year. Their large rounded eyes have no focus, their blank expression makes them unidentifiable and removed from the viewer. Geeta Kapur in discussing Padamsee's early figures relates this removal of identity and realism to an impression of "primitivism". 'In primitive cultures...  images are distinguished for their essential attributes of life they project rather than for their success in verisimilitude or in depicting the natural liveliness, the elegance, or appeal of the human body... Akbar's figures of this period, rigid, unalterable, and securely bound together by a black contour, have correspondences with such images on account of their formal language.' (Geeta Kapur, "The other side of solitude", Akbar Padamsee, Work in Language. B. Padamsee and A. Garimella ed., Marg Publications and Pundole Art Gallery, Mumbai, 2010, p. 330)