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Lot Essay
Over the past several years, vivid colour and an extroverted expression of the senses have disappeared from my canvases. I have been seduced by a palette of broken tones … by a visible search for a more distilled essence. I think that so much more can be said by the half-tone than by the blatancy of primary colour … I prefer to haunt a mysterious world of veiled lights and sudden discoveries.
- Jehangir Sabavala
The 1960s were a profoundly transformative period in Jehangir Sabavala’s oeuvre. Over the course of this decade, the artist subjected his visual vocabulary to uncompromising scrutiny, constantly clarifying and refining it. This new, determined focus produced some of the Sabavala’s finest work, leading his biographer Ranjit Hoskote to describe his paintings from the period as “visionary landscapes” that transcended familiar subjects and genres becoming “site[s] of epiphany”.
Moving away from the formal principles of Cubism and the bright colors he had experimented with in the late 1950s, following his academic training in England and France, Sabavala turned to a more personal language and restrained palette that responded to the surroundings he returned to in India. The work of Lyonel Feininger provided him with critical guidance in this transition. As he noted, “Through Feininger’s pure, precise and yet very delicate and personal renderings of cloud and boat and sea, I discovered the joys of extending form into the beauty and clarity of light. I became interested in the source of light, its direction, its effect. Through these experiments, gradually, my work changed” (Artist statement, R. Hoskote, The Crucible of Painting: The Art of Jehangir Sabavala, Mumbai, 2005, p. 89, 95).
The present lot, a sweeping seascape from 1969 titled A Progression of Sails, represents the zenith of Sabavala’s quest for a new, sophisticated yet deeply personal idiom. Inspired by the Arabian sea and the natural harbor of Bombay where he lived, here the artist uses a finely graded palette to portray a group of sailboats dotting the tranquil waters of the bay, their billowing sails connecting the bands of sea and sky. Literally ‘extending form into the beauty and clarity of light’, the artist masterfully deploys pigment with delicately varied opacities and textures to invite viewers into the serene world he creates, offering a place of refuge and reflection to escape the pressures and anxieties of everyday life.
In addition to Feininger, Sabavala’s luminescent land and seascapes from this period, with their diffused light and burnished layers of translucent paint, also pay homage to J.M.W. Turner and Caspar David Friedrich, whose work he greatly admired. “At the level of immediate sensation, we are struck by the obvious physical beauty of the painting as product, process and parallel reality. And as we enter Sabavala’s spaces, with trepidation, to inhabit them, we apprehend their disquieting melancholy and their restful tranquility; the paradox underscores the artist’s uncertainty about his place in the universe, his exploration of an infinity that can be measured only in mirages, illuminated only through mystery” (R. Hoskote, Ibid., 2005, p. 109).
A Progression of Sails was exhibited the same year it was painted by Gallery Chemould at Jehangir Art Gallery in Bombay. Writing about this exhibition, the critic Dnyaneshwar Nadkarni noted that it included “work primarily based on an intensely personal study of the Indian landscape. But it eschews both realism and impressionism in an effort to catch the distilled essence of typically Indian skies and topography. Studying the myriad colour patterns of a changing horizon, Sabavala tries to invest the scene – whether it be a phalanx of wood-studded mountains, a lush green field or an estuary with a hint of sailing boats in the distance – with a metaphysical awareness” (D. Nadkarni, ‘Foreword’, Jehangir Sabavala, Bombay, 1969, unpaginated).
- Jehangir Sabavala
The 1960s were a profoundly transformative period in Jehangir Sabavala’s oeuvre. Over the course of this decade, the artist subjected his visual vocabulary to uncompromising scrutiny, constantly clarifying and refining it. This new, determined focus produced some of the Sabavala’s finest work, leading his biographer Ranjit Hoskote to describe his paintings from the period as “visionary landscapes” that transcended familiar subjects and genres becoming “site[s] of epiphany”.
Moving away from the formal principles of Cubism and the bright colors he had experimented with in the late 1950s, following his academic training in England and France, Sabavala turned to a more personal language and restrained palette that responded to the surroundings he returned to in India. The work of Lyonel Feininger provided him with critical guidance in this transition. As he noted, “Through Feininger’s pure, precise and yet very delicate and personal renderings of cloud and boat and sea, I discovered the joys of extending form into the beauty and clarity of light. I became interested in the source of light, its direction, its effect. Through these experiments, gradually, my work changed” (Artist statement, R. Hoskote, The Crucible of Painting: The Art of Jehangir Sabavala, Mumbai, 2005, p. 89, 95).
The present lot, a sweeping seascape from 1969 titled A Progression of Sails, represents the zenith of Sabavala’s quest for a new, sophisticated yet deeply personal idiom. Inspired by the Arabian sea and the natural harbor of Bombay where he lived, here the artist uses a finely graded palette to portray a group of sailboats dotting the tranquil waters of the bay, their billowing sails connecting the bands of sea and sky. Literally ‘extending form into the beauty and clarity of light’, the artist masterfully deploys pigment with delicately varied opacities and textures to invite viewers into the serene world he creates, offering a place of refuge and reflection to escape the pressures and anxieties of everyday life.
In addition to Feininger, Sabavala’s luminescent land and seascapes from this period, with their diffused light and burnished layers of translucent paint, also pay homage to J.M.W. Turner and Caspar David Friedrich, whose work he greatly admired. “At the level of immediate sensation, we are struck by the obvious physical beauty of the painting as product, process and parallel reality. And as we enter Sabavala’s spaces, with trepidation, to inhabit them, we apprehend their disquieting melancholy and their restful tranquility; the paradox underscores the artist’s uncertainty about his place in the universe, his exploration of an infinity that can be measured only in mirages, illuminated only through mystery” (R. Hoskote, Ibid., 2005, p. 109).
A Progression of Sails was exhibited the same year it was painted by Gallery Chemould at Jehangir Art Gallery in Bombay. Writing about this exhibition, the critic Dnyaneshwar Nadkarni noted that it included “work primarily based on an intensely personal study of the Indian landscape. But it eschews both realism and impressionism in an effort to catch the distilled essence of typically Indian skies and topography. Studying the myriad colour patterns of a changing horizon, Sabavala tries to invest the scene – whether it be a phalanx of wood-studded mountains, a lush green field or an estuary with a hint of sailing boats in the distance – with a metaphysical awareness” (D. Nadkarni, ‘Foreword’, Jehangir Sabavala, Bombay, 1969, unpaginated).