Jagdish Swaminathan (1928 - 1994)

Acquired from Dhoomimal Gallery, New Delhi, 1982

Good overall condition. Color slightly more vivid than in catalog illustration. Two extremely small brown stains visible in catalog illustration.
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During the 1960s, Jagdish Swaminathan abandoned his career as a journalist and became a professional painter. In August 1962, he founded Group 1890. The name was derived from the address where the first meeting took place. Group 1890 had no regional or aesthetic affiliations and did not promote any particular type of painting. Rejecting 'vulgar naturalism', the 'pastoral idealism' of the Bengal School and the 'hybrid mannerism' of European modernism, it urged artists to draw inspiration from the natural world and interpret it into symbolic and abstracted forms; to see phenomena in their 'virginal state'. 

'Swaminathan's artistic ambition was to establish a continuum between folk, tribal, and urban contemporary art. Questioning the notion that Modernism developed from an encounter with the West, he sought to redefine contemporary practice by taking into account the philosophical underpinnings of Indian Art.  A truly Indian art could only develop, he felt, by overcoming the divide between art and craft.' (Amrita Jhaveri, A Guide to 101 Modern and Contemporary Indian Artists, Mumbai, 2005, p. 93).

Space and colour also became discernibly important, as evidenced by Swaminathan’s pursuit of alternative pictorial spaces. By dividing the canvas into bright colour fields and then interspersing mountains, trees, stones and birds, the captivating simplicity of his works became emblematic of the subsequent series which was titled Bird, Tree and Mountain. Swaminathan is also using motifs derived from Pahari and Basholi miniatures.

This exquisite painting is one of the largest works from this series in his oeuvre and demonstrates Swaminathan's mastery as a colourist. Compositionally the painting is an unusual example from the artist's Bird, Tree and Mountain series. The textural reflections of the trees contrast against the striking solid flat background, the lonely bird casting a void like shadow. As Geeta Kapur states 'Precisely the one pictorial element in the use of which Swaminathan excels, is colour. And he has developed his colour sensibility, without doubt, on the basis of the Indian tradition which offers a vast variety of the subtlest and most brilliant hues in its art forms, including frescoes and miniatures; folk and tribal art; crafts and textiles.' (G. Kapur, 'J. Swaminathan, Wings of a Metaphor', Contemporary Indian Artists, New Delhi, 1978, p. 210)