Jehangir Sabavala

Acquired directly from the artist in Bombay by GianCarlo and Simonetta Guglielmino, circa 1967

Thence by descent

D. Chitre, The Reasoning Vision - Jehangir Sabavala's Painterly Universe, Tata McGraw-Hill Publishing Company Limited, New Delhi, 1980, illustration p. 22

R. Hoskote, The Crucible of Painting - The Art of Jehangir Sabavala, Eminence Designs Pvt Ltd, Bombay, 2005, illustration p. 107

This painting has been recently cleaned, consolidated and lightly varnished. It is in very good overall condition, as viewed. UV Light: Small scattered spots of retouching are visible under ultra violet light, notably in the centre of the canvas, around the periphery and on the Sentinels.
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Gian Carlo Guglielmino from Turin and Milan, first moved his family to India for the Turin-founded textile industry SNIA-Viscosa, originally an Agnelli and Gualino enterprise.  Some years later he transferred to another Turin-based industrial complex, CEAT, founded in 1924 by Virgilio Bruni Tedeschi, now better known as Carla Bruni Sarkozy’s grandfather.  The Indian branch was created in 1958 in partnership with the TATA Group and Gian Carlo Guglielmino was its Managing Director for several years.

According to the couple's daughters, "As Italians growing up in India, we recognised early that the two cultures share a great deal.  Both ancient civilisations with preeminent centres of learning, philosophy, science and humanities, a mercurial economy driven by entrepreneurship and aesthetics, and enduring emphases on faith, family, technology, cuisine and all the arts.  Our family lived in India, principally Bombay, from 1966 to 1978.  

Bombay, the great port metropolis, business capital of India, in the late 1960s and 1970s was a city remarkable for its vibrant social scene, complex socio-economic interactions, and cultural vigour.  It was a privilege to live there during this period, despite the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971, or arguably because Partition and post-Partition hostilities were still in living memory, this resilient city resonated with an unrivalled harmony between a diverse population of Parsis, Hindus, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Jains, Sikhs and Christians. Fascinated by all aspects of Indian culture, our parents collected widely both Indian and Tibetan art.  We remember elegant gatherings at our home with guests from the various elites, exquisitely dressed, often in couture or costume, including Charles Correa, the celebrated architect; and his artist wife Monika; Shashi Kapoor, the actor; Ravi Shankar, European and American diplomats and businessmen, and the very cosmopolitan Parsi community of Tatas, Sassoons, Jeejebhoys, Readymoneys, Dasturs, Mehtas, and Billimorias.   When we in turn visited the Sabavalas at home, both Shirin and Jehangir being prized family friends, the events are marked in our childhood memories by lively erudite conversation often in French, warmth and laughter, and Jehangir’s wonderful hanging Mughal-style bed!  

This beautiful painting, Sentinel Trees by Jehangir Sabavala, hung in our duplex in Malabar Hill, Bombay throughout our childhood, and then travelled with us as we moved to Chester Square in London, and finally to Tuscany in Italy.  Painted exactly 50 years ago, Sentinel Trees itself now carries this fascinating global biography, something it shares with today’s collectors of modern Indian art.  Importantly the painting graces us with Sabavala’s meditative vision of the Sublime in Nature.  Completed in his mid forties, this work required those decades of mastery to give witness to an incandescent and nostalgic emotion, with its veiled tonalities of pigment and texture that allude to the difficult territory on the journey between mind and heart." Correspondence with the Guglielmino heirs, September 2017

‘Here is a distinguished painterly mind exploring a personalised style after years of grappling with the “joint stock problems of modern art.” The Cubist discipline of his early years is now submerged under this personal vision which reveals itself in shades of expressionistic mysticism, especially in his landscapes.’ (P. Devi, Jehangir Sabavala, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, 1984, book jacket)
Jehangir Sabavala painted landscapes throughout his career. Even though the rationale and disposition, of the works evolved profoundly over the years, sometimes interwoven with other phases such as academic portraiture, still-lifes, and religious compositions, the landscape itself remained central. Another consistent characteristic throughout his oeuvre was the strong use of Cubist elements to achieve varied results in both texture and composition.
Born in 1922 into one of the most influential families of Raj-era Bombay, Sabavala rose to prominence as a painter in the early 1950s, at a moment when European Modernism was sweeping across the international art scene and imparting an avant-garde zeal and fervor upon the Indian subcontinent. The conflicts and challenges faced by post-War Europe and post-Independence India, informed by the artists and collectors with a foot in both continents, gave rise to the Indian avant-garde establishment.

Starting out at the J.J. School of Art in Bombay, Sabavala first went to London in 1945. Here he found himself “working under two schools of thought, one conservative, the other modern. The student was left to learn what he could from these contending elements. After this, several years were spent under the Impressionist masters and more of rigorous apprenticeship with that brilliant Cubist pedagogue the late André Lhote… A decisive tilt was already visible in his work by 1963. Direction steadily passes from observed object to the imagined reality. Approach shifts and simplifies.” (ibid., pp. 2-4)

Sentinel Trees represents this powerful shift in Sabavala’s idiom. Speaking about Sabavala's work from the early 1960s, and in particular, Sentinel Trees, art historian Ranjit Hoskote notes: “Sabavala presents us with effulgent visions in which sentinel trees frame a gleaming isthmus… The discoveries of the preceding phase are consolidated, so that the visionary landscape is perfected in canvas after canvas between 1964 and 1973. Formally, the paintings balance the need to establish a firm anchorage against the desire for upward aspiring movement, ascension; to present gravity while also delivering flight. Commanding vistas proclaim themselves: Sabavala, in quest of the sublime, orchestrates a breath-taking interplay of his austere, geometricizing stylization and that opulent, sensuous understanding of color, that chromaticism which is his forte. The high-keyed palette subsides; the structure achieves an optimal balance between abstraction and representation, a summation of the streams that have poured into his art.” (R. Hoskote, The Crucible of Painting: The Art of Jehangir Sabavala, Eminence Designs Pvt. Ltd., Mumbai, 2005, p. 106-107)
Sabavala’s subdued palette and formulaic construction of form and space is accredited to the influence of German-American artist, Lyonel Feininger in whose works, he found a remedial alternative to the formality of Synthetic cubism. “Through Feininger’s pure, precise and yet very delicate and personal renderings of cloud and boat and sea, I discovered the joys of extending form into the beauty and clarity of light. I became interested in the source of light, its direction, its effect. Through these experiments, gradually, my work changed.” (ibid., p. 95)

Sentinel Trees exemplifies Sabavala’s perspectival inventiveness to create tranquil and mysterious spaces with remarkable depth and tactile sentiment. Commenting on his technique, he once said, “Directional lines arrow across a page, a horizontal (for me of vital significance) cuts a swathe amidst a multitude of parabolas. A scaffolding of verticals is erected, tall and skeletal that balances the sweep of the former.” (P. Devi, Jehangir Sabavala, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, 1984, p. 9) These thoughts are perfectly translated onto the canvas in the current work. The cloaked constellation of trees glows with a light that is reflected from the sky above them against a complimentary grey-blue dusk background, capturing a fleeting moment in time. Employing innovative techniques of faceting and fragmenting, he transforms a basic scene derived from nature into a crystalline world of intersecting geometric planes that in places, borders on abstraction. This hauntingly evocative painting while published in several monographs of the artist, has been cherished in the same private collection for over 50 years and is coming into public view for the first time.