Jagdish Swaminathan (1929-1994)

Staining in top right corner as visible in catalogue illustration. Spots of uneven discoloration in background in lower left corner. Overall good condition. Colours brighter than the catalogue illustration.
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In 1966 Jagdish Swaminathan and Octavio Paz published the magazine Contra, which included critical articles concerning the overbearing influence of the Paris School on the work of the Progressive Artists Group.  In 1947 critic Clement Greenberg reviewed Jackson Pollock and Jean Dubuffet advocating American superiority over the easel painters and traditionalists from Europe.  The 1940s split between the American Abstract Expressionists' interest in mystical primitivism versus the figurative preoccupation of European painters is similar to the diverse views and approaches of Swaminathan and the Progressives in India, two decades later. In stark contrast to the Progressives, Swaminathan's paintings of the 60s were imbued with symbols drawn from Indian tribal art and resisting any influence from movements in the West.

'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).

He argued that in opposition to the Western approach, traditional Indian paintings were never meant to represent reality in the naturalistic objective sense. Likewise his landscapes become metaphors or pictorial tools for the understanding of the Indian notion of Maya, the illusory nature of the manifest world.  In the bird, the mountain, the tree, the reflection series, he melds together aspects of the indigenous aesthetic mentioned above including miniature paintings with their simple compositions and forms coupled with a bold use of color.  Isana Murthy states, 'Swami's greater contribution was in giving Indian sources a contemporary validity and visual identity.  His use of flat colours and spaces in his early work is reminiscent of the Indian miniature and I cannot recall anyone before Swami using the vivid Indian yellow in the manner he did.'

Underlying Swaminathan's iconic conceptual landscapes is a deeply spiritual reverence for the unrealized universe.  The flat planes of saturated yellows and orange delineate and contrast with asymmetrical segments of fine detailing. The mountainous forms appear to be abstracted in the manner of an aerial map but conceptually the works are more complex. The delicate bird, the only identifiable feature, creates a scale which suggests that the landscape is instead a magnified view of minutiae. Yet regardless of these intentional ambiguities  the painting masterfully resonates calm.  'Given the life of the canvas and the colors, a painting is immutable, fixed and eternal.  It does not know growth and decay. Yet it has a life of its own, in as much as it is never the same to any two persons in space or even the same person in time.  Like Zeno's arrow, it is moving yet still, changeless yet changing.'  (J. Swaminathan, "The Traditional Numen and Contemporary Art," in Lalit Kala Contemporary 29, April 1980, pp. 5-10).