Sudhir Patwardhan

Christie's London, 5 October 1999, lot 144

New Delhi, Village Gallery, A Tree in My Life, December 1996

S. Patwardhan, A Tree in My Life, Village Gallery, New Delhi, 1996, illustration p. 48
Y. Dalmia, 'In Conversation with Sudhir Patwardhan,' Journeys: Four Generations of Indian Artists in Their Own Words, Vol 1, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2011, illustration p. 312
R. Hoskote, Sudhir Patwardhan: The Complicit Observer, Eminence Design Pvt. Ltd., Mumbai and Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai, 2004, illustration p. 105 

There is very minor cracking and associated pigment loss which is restricted to the edges of the work, particularly the bottom corner. This work is in overall very good condition, as viewed. The blues in the work appear more saturated in the print catalog.
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“Sudhir Patwardhan, one of India’s finest painters, lives and works in Thane, a satellite township of over a million citizens on the northeastern periphery of Mumbai. The first railway in India ran from Mumbai’s Victoria Terminus Station to Thane in 1853 and ever since the two have remained umbically linked. His experience in Thane gives Patwardhan a unique vantage point that leaves a sharp imprint on his practice. The narratives of middle class urban existence in India predominate here and the artist’s paintings and drawings have, over the decades, rendered with dignity and reassuring compassion the images of commuters, street laborers and vendors going through their daily activity.” (J. Kallat, 'Where I Work: Sudhir Patwardhan,' ArtAsiaPacific, Issue 54, http://artasiapacific.com/Magazine/54/WhereIWorkSudhirPatwardhan)
A retired radiologist and a self-taught painter, Sudhir Patwardhan, who began painting professionally in the 1970s, was an adherent of the Baroda School's development of narrative figuration. Like his contemporaries, which included among others, Bhupen Khakhar, Gieve Patel, Nalini Malani, Nilima Sheikh, Vivan Sundaram and Gulammohammed Sheikh, Patwardhan chose to depict personal and contemporary histories within a format that shows multiple contemporaneous vignettes within the same image. "My aim is to make figures that can become self-images for the people who are the subjects of my work. One of the questions I have asked myself in this context is how close or distanced must I be from the figures I paint. Too close a relation may overburden the image with the artist's private impulses. These impulses give the image intensity, but at the same time they may also insulate the image from other approaches." (S. Patwardhan, Place for People, Bombay and New Delhi, 1981, unpaginated).
The 1990s was a historic decade in India, marked by the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya in 1992 which led to communal riots and the rise of a politics of religion based on Hindu nationalism. Observing Patwardhan’s works from this time, Ranjit Hoskote articulates, “he found himself compelled to draw crowds, even denser masses of people, as though to reassure himself that Indian society had not entirely come apart. The artist recalls being struck by the image of people climbing a staircase at a railway station; here, he thought, was a common minimum situation for humanity, where people could treat one another with minimum consideration. What he saw, instead, was a purely circumstantial assembly; a divided throng, every individual for himself…” (R. Hoskote, Sudhir Patwardhan: The Complicit Observer, Eminence Design Pvt. Ltd., Mumbai and Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai, 2010, p. 25-26).
As we see in the Tree, Patwardhan gives each figure a unique representation and his/her own prominence. Their bodies encompass majority of the canvas and the background has an existential solitariness.  Ranjit Hoskote speaks of this work, “…the impress of Diego Rivera may be discerned in ‘Tree’. The mural style of the Mexican painter… with its figures rising majestically in tiers along upward-curving trajectories, to form a serried mass in which every notable is picked off in his individuality… ‘Tree’ is a vertical frame nearly bisected by a lamp-post, animated by the helter-skelter movement of pedestrians, auto-rickshaw drivers and train commuters; it boasts 26 figures and a dog, yet no gaze intersects with one another; only the dog looks up at a male figure stylized to resemble a hanging god, standing with his arms crossed above his shoulders against the eponymous tree. (ibid., p. 27). 
This painting is known to have been commissioned as part of an exhibition held in Delhi in 1996 whose central theme was a memory or an association with a tree. “The trees I know are mostly city dwellers. They have grown on dirty water, breathing polluted air and catching Glimpses of sunlight escaping between buildings. Knotty and stunted they are not the best specimens of their species. But they are useful members of the city population nevertheless - lending a helping hand to city life whenever possible. Though relegated to the background of our lives, they bear the indifference without complaint.” (S. Patwardhan, A Tree in My Life, The Village Gallery, New Delhi, 1996, p. 48)