Gulam Rasool Santosh (1929 - 1997)

Sotheby's New York, 19 September 2006, lot 58

There is minor hair-line craquelure in the areas of thickly applied paint across the canvas, inherent to the medium. This work is in good condition, as viewed.
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The subject of Santosh’s landscapes are almost always Kashmir. In 1954 Santosh went to Maharaja Sayajirao Unversity Baroda, on a scholarship and studied for two years as a non-colleagiate student under Prof. N.S. Bendre. He returned to Kashmir in 1956. After a while, his early figuration began to  give away to abstraction, particularly leaning toward landscapes. Santosh recounts his visit to the holy Amarnath cave in South Kashmir in 1964 where he had a deeply spiritual experience and possibly a touch of divine grace which  initiated a period of “artistic silence". This present work reflects that period of solitude and quietness.  Stylistically, it engages Cubistic splintering, giving the impression of a landscape formed by individual discrete elements joined together by blankets of snow.  "After a few successful years in Bombay, he settled in Delhi in 1960. He never lost his connection though to Kashmir, Kashmiri poetry, and its landscape and spiritual traditions. His painting explored both figural and landscape subjects, he built up his canvases into a deep impasto, a technique that emerged from his time in Baroda. The early sixties represented a turning point for Santosh, one in which the struggle to articulate an idiom for India’s modern painting ran up against a concern that the work of this period was merely derivative of European styles. He sought to pursue a different path, one that embraced his own Kashmiri heritage and the broader Indian context. For his writing and his painting, Santosh looked for inspiration outside Europe, and found it in the Kashmiri Hills.” (Rebecca M. Brown, Awakening: A Retrospective of G.R. Santosh, Delhi Art Gallery, New Delhi, 2011, pp. 29).