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拍品专文
I strive to absorb and assimilate principles from India's classical and folk art that I find valid for my work and to apply the varied conceptions introduced into picture-making in the West during the past 100 years. My objective is to communicate my emotional reactions and interpretations of selected aspects of life and nature by means of drawings and paintings.
- K.K. Hebbar, 1978
Born in Karnataka in 1911, Kattingeri Krishna Hebbar was one of the most influential pioneers of modern art in India. His interest in art, can be traced back to his teenage years, when he came across reproductions of paintings by Raja Ravi Varma. Hebbar recalls seeing an artist copying one of these prints and being inspired to do the same. He writes, “Full of admiration for Ravi Varma, I returned home with a two anna oliograph [sic] of his Saraswati (goddess of learning). Later I made an enlarged copy of the same, a crude version of course, on the inner wall of our sitting room. I used cheap colour powders mixed with gum. The simple villagers around me were fascinated and considered me a gifted painter. Thus, my interest in art started with the imitation of a Ravi Varma” (Artist statement, An Artist’s Quest, KK Hebbar, New Delhi, 1974, p. 5).
Hebbar honed this interest and his visual vocabulary during his studies, briefly at the Chamarajendra Technical Institute in Mysore, where he found the instruction to simply reproduce or imitate objects and nature oppressive, and then at the Sir J.J. School of Art in Bombay from 1937, where he was trained in Western academic and modern styles as well as Indian miniature painting traditions. Under the guidance of Charles Gerrard, who headed the school at the time, Hebbar came to the first important turning point of his career. Gerrard urged him to seek out an individual way of expressing his experiences and emotions, saying “Recording the life around had better be left to the camera. You must look into the world rather than look at the world” (Artist statement, An Artist’s Quest, KK Hebbar, New Delhi, 1974, p. 6). While it is unsurprising then that Hebbar’s early works focused on naturalistic portraits and landscapes, his style soon evolved following his time in Bombay and his travels and interactions over the next decades.
Hebbar's 1939 meeting with Amrita Sher-Gil in particular had a profound influence on his work, as he was captivated by her use of Western techniques to depict Indian subjects. Another major influence on his work at the time was Ananda Coomaraswamy’s seminal book, Principles of Indian Art. A few years later, in 1946, the artist traveled to Kerala, observing the art, dance and lives of rural communities across the state. Reminding him of Paul Gauguin’s paintings of life in Brittany, these experiences led Hebbar to hone his visual vocabulary further, drawing equally on India’s folk-art traditions, Gauguin’s bold use of colour and the work of Indian artists he admired like Sher-Gil.
Writing about this time, the art historian V.R. Amberkar noted, “Naturally we find him in the 1940’s struggling to be free from the eclecticism of styles like Impressionism of the Western School on the one hand and the Mughal and Rajput styles of our country on the other. Those were the days when the dazzling metamorphosis of Indian and the post-Impressionistic style by Sher-Gil was in vogue. And no wonder, Hebbar had a short interlude with this post-Impressionism. Hebbar is, however, a searcher and at that an intense one by his very nature. This alert, restless, almost impatient artist avidly embraced new styles and new experiments with a sweep as rare and as surprising. The work of that period reveals strangely contradictory results like the emotionalised line of Ajanta and Bagh and the impasto-moulding of masses in oils. His sensitivity of line struggled against the mobile plasticity of the mass. Ultimately the line triumphed and this child of the village with the peripatetic experimentation came back to the village. His subjects of the painting too at that time were rustic in character and dramatic in human elements” (V.R. Amberkar, Hebbar, New Delhi, 1960, p. ii).
After Indian independence, Hebbar traveled to Europe using money awarded to him by the Government of India. “I visited almost all the museums and art galleries studying the various trends in art from the Italian primitive painting to the contemporary movements [...] I admired Picasso’s unique method of distorting his figures, the strength of Matisse’s decorative lines, the rich and sonorous colour scheme of Braque and the evocative quality of Rouault’s paintings [...] I returned home much disturbed and to a certain extent confused [...] I was not prepared to be washed away by the currents dashing at me. Instead, I decided to start from where I had stopped and wanted to fuse into my works various aspects I had learnt from the West. This was a slow process” (Artist statement, An Artist’s Quest, KK Hebbar, New Delhi, 1974, pp. 8-9).
Sublime Shadows includes five major paintings by Hebbar that describe the arc of the long and celebrated career he built following this training. The earliest of the works, lot 19 Untitled (Woman Making Chapatis), dates to 1959, after his return from a second trip to Europe as part of a cultural delegation from India. In paintings from this period, the artist focused on depictions of village life in India, borrowing from both Western and Indian painting traditions. “I maintained the two-dimensional aspect in addition to the textural quality. I would achieve texture by the forceful application of colour with a palette knife. The under-paint method proved useful to achieve vibration in colour. As for the content, I turned to workers’ life – their sorrows and joys” (Artist statement, An Artist’s Quest, KK Hebbar, New Delhi, 1974, p. 10).
In lot 20, Untitled (Gulmohar Tree) from 1962, and lot 33, Morning Glory painted in 1971, Hebbar showcases the mastery of colour and unique technique he developed to convey both joyously loud and poetically subtle celebrations of nature and its beauty, inspired by his surroundings in India. In paintings like these, “Hebbar’s art begins with the visible world of realism and culminates with the ephemeral and intangible world of abstraction. At no point, however, does he completely abandon figuration. Instead his abstraction is distilled from nature into a clarity of form and texture that culminates in a grand simplicity of colour and design. At his peak he mastered the art of separating the superfluous from the essential” (Thimmaiah, K. K. Hebbar: An Artist's Quest, Bangalore, 2011, p. 31).
In lot 32, Into Space painted in 1965, the artist turns his attention to the Cold War era space race between the USA and USSR. During the height of this competition in the mid-1960s, after the first satellites had been launched and the first human was sent into space, and when a moon landing finally seemed achievable, Hebbar produced a series of works featuring projectiles in flight towards planet-like orbs expressing his admiration for the scientific advances of the period. In this painting, an almost avian rocket with what seems like colourful plumage thrusts upward from the lower left, making its ways to the silvery moon that lights the scene.
Rounding out the selection is lot 50, an Untitled painting from 1977, from the artist’s critically acclaimed series of works that focused on the socioeconomic and political landscape of India. Deeply affected by the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971, and the mass displacement of people that followed, Hebbar worked on a series of expressive paintings that communicated the suffering he witnessed. Here, a lone woman with a bowed head carries a bucket away from a group of ramshackle huts in an otherwise barren landscape. A blood-red band above the horizon, either the sky or the River Padma which he painted in other works from this series, references the horrors that led up to this. In these paintings, the human figures were “scribbled like inscriptions on a wall surface [...] Here I have tried to integrate the sense of space and time. In these later works, a symbolic approach is quite evident” (Artist statement, An Artist’s Quest, KK Hebbar, New Delhi, 1974, p. 10).
All of these paintings by Hebbar, ranging from the figurative to the abstracted, “have certain distinctive qualities such as linear rhythm, spatial harmony and expressive colours. The themes he chooses are earthy and commonplace, but his penetrating insight, sensitive temperament and consummate craftsmanship transform them into sublimity itself” (K.K. Hebbar, exhibition catalogue, New Delhi, 1993).
- K.K. Hebbar, 1978
Born in Karnataka in 1911, Kattingeri Krishna Hebbar was one of the most influential pioneers of modern art in India. His interest in art, can be traced back to his teenage years, when he came across reproductions of paintings by Raja Ravi Varma. Hebbar recalls seeing an artist copying one of these prints and being inspired to do the same. He writes, “Full of admiration for Ravi Varma, I returned home with a two anna oliograph [sic] of his Saraswati (goddess of learning). Later I made an enlarged copy of the same, a crude version of course, on the inner wall of our sitting room. I used cheap colour powders mixed with gum. The simple villagers around me were fascinated and considered me a gifted painter. Thus, my interest in art started with the imitation of a Ravi Varma” (Artist statement, An Artist’s Quest, KK Hebbar, New Delhi, 1974, p. 5).
Hebbar honed this interest and his visual vocabulary during his studies, briefly at the Chamarajendra Technical Institute in Mysore, where he found the instruction to simply reproduce or imitate objects and nature oppressive, and then at the Sir J.J. School of Art in Bombay from 1937, where he was trained in Western academic and modern styles as well as Indian miniature painting traditions. Under the guidance of Charles Gerrard, who headed the school at the time, Hebbar came to the first important turning point of his career. Gerrard urged him to seek out an individual way of expressing his experiences and emotions, saying “Recording the life around had better be left to the camera. You must look into the world rather than look at the world” (Artist statement, An Artist’s Quest, KK Hebbar, New Delhi, 1974, p. 6). While it is unsurprising then that Hebbar’s early works focused on naturalistic portraits and landscapes, his style soon evolved following his time in Bombay and his travels and interactions over the next decades.
Hebbar's 1939 meeting with Amrita Sher-Gil in particular had a profound influence on his work, as he was captivated by her use of Western techniques to depict Indian subjects. Another major influence on his work at the time was Ananda Coomaraswamy’s seminal book, Principles of Indian Art. A few years later, in 1946, the artist traveled to Kerala, observing the art, dance and lives of rural communities across the state. Reminding him of Paul Gauguin’s paintings of life in Brittany, these experiences led Hebbar to hone his visual vocabulary further, drawing equally on India’s folk-art traditions, Gauguin’s bold use of colour and the work of Indian artists he admired like Sher-Gil.
Writing about this time, the art historian V.R. Amberkar noted, “Naturally we find him in the 1940’s struggling to be free from the eclecticism of styles like Impressionism of the Western School on the one hand and the Mughal and Rajput styles of our country on the other. Those were the days when the dazzling metamorphosis of Indian and the post-Impressionistic style by Sher-Gil was in vogue. And no wonder, Hebbar had a short interlude with this post-Impressionism. Hebbar is, however, a searcher and at that an intense one by his very nature. This alert, restless, almost impatient artist avidly embraced new styles and new experiments with a sweep as rare and as surprising. The work of that period reveals strangely contradictory results like the emotionalised line of Ajanta and Bagh and the impasto-moulding of masses in oils. His sensitivity of line struggled against the mobile plasticity of the mass. Ultimately the line triumphed and this child of the village with the peripatetic experimentation came back to the village. His subjects of the painting too at that time were rustic in character and dramatic in human elements” (V.R. Amberkar, Hebbar, New Delhi, 1960, p. ii).
After Indian independence, Hebbar traveled to Europe using money awarded to him by the Government of India. “I visited almost all the museums and art galleries studying the various trends in art from the Italian primitive painting to the contemporary movements [...] I admired Picasso’s unique method of distorting his figures, the strength of Matisse’s decorative lines, the rich and sonorous colour scheme of Braque and the evocative quality of Rouault’s paintings [...] I returned home much disturbed and to a certain extent confused [...] I was not prepared to be washed away by the currents dashing at me. Instead, I decided to start from where I had stopped and wanted to fuse into my works various aspects I had learnt from the West. This was a slow process” (Artist statement, An Artist’s Quest, KK Hebbar, New Delhi, 1974, pp. 8-9).
Sublime Shadows includes five major paintings by Hebbar that describe the arc of the long and celebrated career he built following this training. The earliest of the works, lot 19 Untitled (Woman Making Chapatis), dates to 1959, after his return from a second trip to Europe as part of a cultural delegation from India. In paintings from this period, the artist focused on depictions of village life in India, borrowing from both Western and Indian painting traditions. “I maintained the two-dimensional aspect in addition to the textural quality. I would achieve texture by the forceful application of colour with a palette knife. The under-paint method proved useful to achieve vibration in colour. As for the content, I turned to workers’ life – their sorrows and joys” (Artist statement, An Artist’s Quest, KK Hebbar, New Delhi, 1974, p. 10).
In lot 20, Untitled (Gulmohar Tree) from 1962, and lot 33, Morning Glory painted in 1971, Hebbar showcases the mastery of colour and unique technique he developed to convey both joyously loud and poetically subtle celebrations of nature and its beauty, inspired by his surroundings in India. In paintings like these, “Hebbar’s art begins with the visible world of realism and culminates with the ephemeral and intangible world of abstraction. At no point, however, does he completely abandon figuration. Instead his abstraction is distilled from nature into a clarity of form and texture that culminates in a grand simplicity of colour and design. At his peak he mastered the art of separating the superfluous from the essential” (Thimmaiah, K. K. Hebbar: An Artist's Quest, Bangalore, 2011, p. 31).
In lot 32, Into Space painted in 1965, the artist turns his attention to the Cold War era space race between the USA and USSR. During the height of this competition in the mid-1960s, after the first satellites had been launched and the first human was sent into space, and when a moon landing finally seemed achievable, Hebbar produced a series of works featuring projectiles in flight towards planet-like orbs expressing his admiration for the scientific advances of the period. In this painting, an almost avian rocket with what seems like colourful plumage thrusts upward from the lower left, making its ways to the silvery moon that lights the scene.
Rounding out the selection is lot 50, an Untitled painting from 1977, from the artist’s critically acclaimed series of works that focused on the socioeconomic and political landscape of India. Deeply affected by the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971, and the mass displacement of people that followed, Hebbar worked on a series of expressive paintings that communicated the suffering he witnessed. Here, a lone woman with a bowed head carries a bucket away from a group of ramshackle huts in an otherwise barren landscape. A blood-red band above the horizon, either the sky or the River Padma which he painted in other works from this series, references the horrors that led up to this. In these paintings, the human figures were “scribbled like inscriptions on a wall surface [...] Here I have tried to integrate the sense of space and time. In these later works, a symbolic approach is quite evident” (Artist statement, An Artist’s Quest, KK Hebbar, New Delhi, 1974, p. 10).
All of these paintings by Hebbar, ranging from the figurative to the abstracted, “have certain distinctive qualities such as linear rhythm, spatial harmony and expressive colours. The themes he chooses are earthy and commonplace, but his penetrating insight, sensitive temperament and consummate craftsmanship transform them into sublimity itself” (K.K. Hebbar, exhibition catalogue, New Delhi, 1993).