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VASUDEO S. GAITONDE (1924-2001) Untitled signed in Hindi and dated ''83' and signed and dated 'V.S. GAITONDE’ / 1983,’ (on the reverse) oil on canvas 44? x 32 in. (113.7 x 81.3 cm.) Painted in 1983
What makes Gaitonde at once represent and stand apart from the Indian Modern tradition goes beyond his immersion into its shared language, or even his restrained aesthetics with its universal vocabulary [...] For many of his contemporaries, the language was just a tool to express something. For Gaitonde, the language became the subject: it was the expression. He did not attempt to use line and colour to create forms; his forte was the exploration of the relationship between line and colour. If he captured the essence of Indian Modernism, it was by disengaging from its effusion, its gaiety and its materialism.
- Hemant Sareen, 2015
The central characteristic of Gaitonde’s artistic personality, it must be understood, is that he likes to stand alone […] This independent-mindedness was accompanied by a firm belief in his identity as a painter.
- Dnyaneshwar Nadkarni, 1983
An uncompromising artist of great integrity, Vasudeo S. Gaitonde distanced himself from anything he deemed superfluous to the contemplative rigor he believed his art required. After his move to Delhi in the early 1970s, he was “very much the artist in a garret. The few writers who visited him spoke about its dusty interiors, and the immensely reticent resident of the place. Goan artist Theodore Mesquita, who met him in Delhi in 1991, described him as a ‘hermit’, impassive to the mundane world around him” (P. Pundir, ‘An Untitled Canvas’, Indian Express, 5 January 2014). As early as the 1950s, Richard Bartholomew also described him as “a quiet man and a painter of the quiet reaches of the imagination” (D. Nadkarni, Gaitonde, New Delhi, 1983, unpaginated).
Following a 1964 trip to New York on the Rockefeller Fund Fellowship, where Gaitonde encountered the works of several Abstract Expressionist and Conceptual artists in the flesh for the first time, his style began to evolve. His paintings began to explore the relationships between form, light and color in a diligent, sophisticated manner. In these works, “The planes of paint spread over the canvas, a reminder of nothing other than themselves [...] shafts of light which seem to emerge from the depths. An almost spiritual sublimation gets created from within paint rather than by reference to any school of thought” (Y. Dalmia, Indian Contemporary Art Post Independence, New Delhi, 1997, p. 18).
This luminous painting from 1983 showcases Gaitonde as painter and philosopher at the zenith of this exploration. One of the last works he completed before an automobile accident left him temporarily unable to paint large canvases, this work represents a mature, confident and resolved vocabulary and is testament to the artist’s technical mastery of his medium. Scrupulously manipulating pigments, the artist coordinated their convergences and reactions on the canvas with precision, leaving nothing to chance. A result of this meticulous process, this multi-layered work illuminates Gaitonde’s deep interest in the methodology of painting itself.
Through a precise handling of light and shadow, form and space, movement and stasis, Gaitonde draws viewers in with what the New York Times critic Holland Cotter dubbed ‘aqueous layers’ of pigment, recalling the vastness and enigmatic nature of the sea. Simultaneously airy and viscous, this painting exudes tension, created between the layers of translucent pigment and the even lighter hieroglyphic forms that run across and between them like filaments of esoteric calligraphy in some ancient manuscript. Layering shades of color with different opacities, Gaitonde creates a sense of depth that adds to the hypnotic magnetism of the painting, drawing his viewers in to form their own relationship with it and interpret it based on this personal communion.
Writing about Gaitonde’s works in 1983, the same year as the present lot was painted, the critic Dnyaneshwar Nadkarni notes that they are like “vast, translucent pool[s] of paint, a reminder that the materials available to the artist themselves surrender the maximum of values [...] in these paintings, the medium is not separate from the so-called content [...] The canvas looks like an ocean; to carry the simile further, it is as if we are looking down on the mildly lapping waters of the sea near a pier and, in the half light, gazing at things surfacing or floating in the water. The motifs in these canvases literally surface in the pool of paint, and they convey a variety of associations” (D. Nadkarni, Gaitonde, New Delhi, 1983, not paginated).
Subtly graded from the faintest greenish-blue to a deep aquamarine at the center and lower margins, the surface of this painting seems to radiate an inner light. “The colour glows; it becomes transparent; it clots. It is this play of pigment, as it is absorbed physically into the canvas that directs the eye. Texture is structure. How he achieves this texture is the secret of Gaitonde’s style [...] The order is almost deliberately obscured by the distribution of near-random forms across the surface. These topographical or hieroglyphic forms themselves are made to dissolve into the field like enamel in an encaustic [...] The continual work of laying on pigment, dissolving it, stripping it off, and overlaying (like a process of nature) comes to a natural close as the pigmentation comes to a natural conclusion. The painter is at the controls, he decides when the painting has arrived at its capacity to articulate, yet he registers things intuitively” (P. Karunakar, ‘V.S. Gaitonde’, Lalit Kala Contemporary 19-20, New Delhi, 1975, pp. 15-16).
Fiercely independent, and a firm believer in the creative potential of solitude and silence in art and life, Gaitonde made a conscious effort to reject external, ephemeral influences on his work. Given his uncompromising, timeless vision, Gaitonde was “cautious about his work being conditioned by any passing trend or form [...] Gaitonde’s economy of visual elements, produced through a laborious process, seems more like an attempt to achieve a deliberate abstruseness. That was the hallmark of the Modern, be it Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Joyce’s Ulysses or Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. It is worth considering that he came of age when independent India was very young indeed. In that context, Gaitonde’s painstaking process and the difficulty of reading his work might serve as a metaphor for the struggle – both for Indian Modern art and the then ‘infant’ nation – for clarity of purpose and true access to modernity” (H. Sareen, ‘The Importance of Nothing’, IQ The Indian Quarterly, Vol. 3 Issue 2, January-March 2015, accessed January 2020).