Vasudeo S. Gaitonde (1924-2001)

Three small horizontal tears along right edge have been restored and strengthened from behind with associated areas of retouching to background, white apparent under U.V. light. Horizontal stretcher marks on top and bottom edges. Fair overall condition. Oranges in catalogue illustration slightly oversaturated.
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Gaitonde paintings of the '50s are a rarity because his collectors were usually European businessmen and diplomats visiting Bombay (few Indians had a taste for pure abstraction), who took their paintings back to Europe when they returned. As a result these works are now virtually untraceable.

This quiet painting of 1958, very Klee-esque in flavour, is subtle, simple and self-assured. At this point Gaitonde was nearing the end of one phase (a decade-long absorption in Paul Klee) and was on the verge of discovering Zen.

Here the painter makes no attempt to seduce the eye (notice the plain unaccented ground), and yet it is the simplicity and barely concealed austerity that draws the viewer into the work. While the composition has only a few elements, in the hands of a skilled artist--and as if by a magic alchemy--these coalesce to create a rich inner dynamics, providing the viewer with a gratifying aesthetic experience.

Gaitonde believed that the play of opposites was central to abstraction. In this painting, we see masculine and feminine energies clearly at work--the masculine in the angularity of the bold linear elements, and the feminine in the warm palette, the gentle brushwork of the colour masses, and the limpid pools of light at the top left and bottom. The play of positive and negative spaces is also carefully worked out.

There is a palpable tension between the vertical and horizontal, an aspect that the artist continually explored. While his paintings of the mid '50s were usually vertical, we see here the beginnings of a tilt towards the horizontal--a format he would favour in many large works of the '60s.

Gaitonde had a perennial fascination for primary forms, notably the circle and the triangle. This cerebral composition is, in a sense, an ode to the triangle. No less than seven, some defined and others suggested, are held together in a delicate interplay.

The arrow was a device much loved by Paul Klee, and not without reason. A very potent symbol, it functions simultaneously at three levels--the structural, the kinetic, and the dimensional or spiritual. Here, dominating the visual field, it holds the painting together.
(Mamta Saran, New Delhi, author of a forthcoming book on Gaitonde).