Jagdish Swaminathan

Christie’s New York, Indian and Southeast Asian Art including 20th Century Indian, 19 September 2002, lot 329

K. Khanna, J. Swaminathan, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, 1995, illustration cover

While the 1970s and 80s were largely defined by his Bird and Mountain series, Swaminathan changed course in the 90s and experimented with earthier tones, textural paint application and more geometrically focused compositions. An interest that started decades earlier in an encounter with a young boy treated for a snake bite by a village doctor, indigenous practices became the cornerstone of this aesthetic. Through natural mediums such as sand, linseed oil and beeswax, the artist positioned Adivasi art (as he preferred to call it) within a contemporary art context and questioned the meaning of symbols and their signs in a new way. Form and process were fundamental to this era of paintings, along with the intuition that came with the arrangement of pigment and iconography.

‘Significantly, the paintings of the last phase of his life were concerned with the passage of a sign on its way to becoming a symbol… He worked at high speed and unlike his previous techniques, there were no removals, only additions and there was never any question of piecemeal editing. 'Whatever gets threaded has to be a pearl,' he would say implying that whatever happened in the wake of the intensity of his thrust had to be right.’ (K. Khanna, J. Swaminathan: Contemporary Indian Art Series, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, 1995, unpaginated)

In the current lot, atop a richly textured black, cream and brown ground, the artist introduces triangular and s-shaped symbols to create a nuanced pattern. The short, curved lines perhaps represent the snake that captured Swaminathan’s attention early on, adding a sense of the tangible world into an otherwise abstract amalgam of shapes and lines. Texture plays a significant role on the canvas with both added and recessive dimension throughout, and the bordering brown pigment further creates spatial dimension against a primarily black-and-white contrast.

The present lot is illustrated on the cover of Lalit Kala Akademi’s book on the artist in its foundational series of contemporary Indian art, showing its importance within Swaminathan’s oeuvre. Transcendent in its symbolism and exploration of sign/symbol dichotomy and painted only a year before his death, Untitled is a masterful, and one of the penultimate, representations of Swaminathan’s lifelong quest to distill an ultimate, higher meaning through paint.

'In his art practice, Swaminathan went full circle, from the elemental power of myths and symbols to a re-exploration of spatial concepts in traditional Indian painting, with its magical use of geometry, shifting from pristine color geometry to space geometry and back to restoring the original mystery of space that he believed was beyond analysis.'  (R. Karode, 'Indigenist Impulses and Modernist Assertions in Indian Art: 1950-1990' in S. Jhaveri (ed.), The Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975-1998, Prestel, London, 2024, p. 152)