Jehangir Sabavala (1922 - 2011)

Acquired directly from the artist in the early 1960s

R. Hoskote, Pilgrim, Exile, Sorcerer, The Painterly Evolution of Jehangir Sabavala, Eminence Designs, Bombay, 1998, p. 162

This work has recently been cleaned and conservation has addressed minor chips and lifting near the lower center of the canvas.
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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, this painting, made in 1960, represents an important transitional period in the artist's career. ‘By 1960, Sabavala had begun to forge a personal vocabulary, a pictorial language for himself. He realised that it would have to be a language that seeped into the fibres of the canvas on which it was painted; not one that evaporated after casting a brief spell of lustre. As the 1950s passed into the 1960s, he moved ever further from the virtuoso performance and towards the discovery procedure: from painting as pretext for adventure, to the painting as site of epiphany. That is to say, his preoccupation shifted from genre to theme, from the evocation of the motif to the quest for the image.’ (R. Hoskote, The Crucible of Painting: The Art of Jehangir Sabavala, Bombay, 2005, p. 89)

Compositionally this painting is very similar to one titled Sails on a Golden Afternoon. Both paintings comprise an intricate web of triangles and arcs  into which Sabavala has painted separate colours to distinguish between the water, boats and birds. When commenting on this painting and other similar works produced at this time, Ramachandra Rao has very aptly noted that Sabavala 'strives to express his emotion by the juxtaposition of planes and the interplay of tones in a symmetrical architecture of many facets; he builds solidly with an almost mathematical precision, often cementing his structures by a strong binding line. From a representation of the objective reality, his natural progression has lain in the direction of abstract art, towards the exploration of chromatic orchestration, without the emotional incubus of the figure or anecdote. First, the geometrical stylisation of reality in patterned colours of deep resonance, as of stained glass; then, realisations of angular, inter-locked planes, independent of visual references; and, as of today, a quest for a chaste, almost monastic, simplicity of eliminative form, addressed to an intricate interplay of vibrant colour planes [...] He imposes on himself a meticulous discipline in the intellectual search for crystalline form, for its disposition into compositions of fastidious colour textures, under the constraint of Cubism; appearances, sail-boats and birds in flight, surrender their identities in near-abstract patterns of triangles and parabolas; in this manner, working out his own syllogism, he has the field all to himself, a private domain.' (P. R. Ramachandra Rao, Contemporary Indian Art, Madras, 1969, p.19)

The title Incarnadine comes from the French word which describes the blood-red colour of raw flesh. This poetically visual term aptly typifies the colours used in this painting. With a richly textured surface rendered in varying shades of red, Incarnadine is a beautiful example of Sabavala’s meditative focus on a single image.