Painting 1959

This painting represents an important transitional moment in the practice of influential Indian modernist V.S. Gaitonde, produced after he switched from brush and watercolor to painting with a palette knife and rollers on canvas. Layering color on color, Gaitonde’s technique yields hazy, rectilinear forms against a mottled green background. Inspired by Zen approaches to the self, his goal was less an abstract image than a method of introspection produced by working slowly and deliberately in relation to chance and limits. The width of his tools or the volume of the blob dropped on the canvas would thus determine the forms in the work. Gaitonde’s cool palette, shot through with white on its axes, presents painting as not just a projection of an artist’s will, but as an image that emerges from itself, layer upon layer.

Gaitonde’s approach to non-objective painting bridged techniques drawn from Mughal miniatures, Zen Buddhism, and European modernist approaches to color and abstraction. Gaitonde completed a fairly orthodox art education at the J. J. School of Art in Bombay (now Mumbai) before joining the Progressive Artists’ Group. A reaction to the bloody forced process of separation of India and Pakistan into Hindu and Muslim domains known as Partition, the Progressive Artists’ Group (PAG) rejected academic naturalism with its roots in British colonization and traditional Indian religious painting which they saw as a revivalist mode for conservative nationalism. Cosmopolitan and religiously diverse, the PAG charted a syncretic Indian Modernism that borrowed liberally and purposively from Western avant-gardes and indigenous Indian art. Within this milieu, Gaitonde realizes a modernist painting that is no mere imitation of western modes, instead pursuing hybrid forms that engaged with the crises and questions of India’s newly post-colonial society.

Global Gestures: Post-War Abstraction from the Lowenthal Collection (2.15-3.21.2019)