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Lot Essay
I strive to absorb and assimilate principles from India's classical and folk art that I find valid for my work and to apply the varied conceptions introduced into picture-making in the West during the past 100 years. My objective is to communicate my emotional reactions and interpretations of selected aspects of life and nature by means of drawings and paintings.
- K.K. Hebbar, 1978
Born in Karnataka in 1911, Kattingeri Krishna Hebbar was one of the most influential pioneers of modern art in India. The artist honed his visual vocabulary during his studies at the Sir J. J. School of Art in Bombay from 1934-38, where he was trained in Western academic styles as well as Indian miniature painting traditions. It is unsurprising then that his early works focused on naturalistic portraits and landscapes, this style soon evolved following his travels and interactions over the next decades.
Hebbar's 1939 meeting with Amrita Sher-Gil in particular had a profound influence on his work, as he was captivated by her use of Western techniques to depict Indian subjects. A few years later, in 1946, he traveled to Kerala, observing the art, dance and lives of rural communities across the state. Reminding him of Paul Gauguin’s paintings of life in Tahiti, these experiences led Hebbar to hone his visual vocabulary further, drawing equally on India’s folk-art traditions, Gauguin’s bold use of color and the work of Indian artists he admired like Sher-Gil.
Writing about this time, the art historian V.R. Amberkar noted, “Naturally we find him in the 1940’s struggling to be free from the eclecticism of styles like Impressionism of the Western School on the one hand and the Mughal and Rajput styles of our country on the other. Those were the days when the dazzling metamorphosis of Indian and the post-Impressionistic style by Sher-Gil was in vogue. And no wonder, Hebbar had a short interlude with this post-Impressionism. Hebbar is, however, a searcher and at that an intense one by his very nature. This alert, restless, almost impatient artist avidly embraced new styles and new experiments with a sweep as rare and as surprising. The work of that period reveals strangely contradictory results like the emotionalised line of Ajanta and Bagh and the impasto-moulding of masses in oils. His sensitivity of line struggled against the mobile plasticity of the mass. Ultimately the line triumphed and this child of the village with the peripatetic experimentation came back to the village. His subjects of the painting too at that time were rustic in character and dramatic in human elements” (V.R. Amberkar, Hebbar, New Delhi, 1960, p. ii).
In the present lot, an untitled portrayal of an intergenerational group of women that dates to this period, Hebbar portrays what appears to be a new bride with the closest members of her family in an intimate domestic setting. The central figure, likely the bride’s mother, tends lovingly to her bashful daughter, covering her hair with a dupatta or shawl in the traditional practice of ghoongat or veiling followed by married women. An older matriarch, seated on a low wooden stool, appears to be the master of ceremonies, looking on in approval and pride at the transmission of these cultural practices from one generation to the next.
Here, Hebbar both draws from and subverts the age-old artistic tradition of ‘la toilette’ paintings, or depictions of women’s intimate rituals of getting ready for the day. Documenting the private life and routines of noble or bourgeois women, toilette scenes were a popular genre across time and tradition. From late Renaissance tapestries, Japanese prints and Indian miniature paintings to well-known Rococo and Impressionist artworks, paintings of ladies washing and dressing, either alone or being attended to, usually catered to the male gaze, providing a voyeuristic view into spaces they did not typically have access to.
Hebbar’s adaptation of this tradition to a typically Indian context, much like Sher-Gil’s seminal 1937 painting Bride’s Toilet, which he would have been aware of at the time, eschews voyeurism for tenderness, depicting an important ritual for a new bride and the communal nature of all such rites of passage. The artist has also depicted other bridal ceremonies like the haldi and mehendi in similar works from this period.
“Hebbar's works have certain distinctive qualities such as linear rhythm, spatial harmony and expressive colours. The themes he chooses are earthy and commonplace, but his penetrating insight, sensitive temperament and consummate craftsmanship transform them into sublimity itself” (K.K. Hebbar, exhibition catalogue, New Delhi, 1993).
- K.K. Hebbar, 1978
Born in Karnataka in 1911, Kattingeri Krishna Hebbar was one of the most influential pioneers of modern art in India. The artist honed his visual vocabulary during his studies at the Sir J. J. School of Art in Bombay from 1934-38, where he was trained in Western academic styles as well as Indian miniature painting traditions. It is unsurprising then that his early works focused on naturalistic portraits and landscapes, this style soon evolved following his travels and interactions over the next decades.
Hebbar's 1939 meeting with Amrita Sher-Gil in particular had a profound influence on his work, as he was captivated by her use of Western techniques to depict Indian subjects. A few years later, in 1946, he traveled to Kerala, observing the art, dance and lives of rural communities across the state. Reminding him of Paul Gauguin’s paintings of life in Tahiti, these experiences led Hebbar to hone his visual vocabulary further, drawing equally on India’s folk-art traditions, Gauguin’s bold use of color and the work of Indian artists he admired like Sher-Gil.
Writing about this time, the art historian V.R. Amberkar noted, “Naturally we find him in the 1940’s struggling to be free from the eclecticism of styles like Impressionism of the Western School on the one hand and the Mughal and Rajput styles of our country on the other. Those were the days when the dazzling metamorphosis of Indian and the post-Impressionistic style by Sher-Gil was in vogue. And no wonder, Hebbar had a short interlude with this post-Impressionism. Hebbar is, however, a searcher and at that an intense one by his very nature. This alert, restless, almost impatient artist avidly embraced new styles and new experiments with a sweep as rare and as surprising. The work of that period reveals strangely contradictory results like the emotionalised line of Ajanta and Bagh and the impasto-moulding of masses in oils. His sensitivity of line struggled against the mobile plasticity of the mass. Ultimately the line triumphed and this child of the village with the peripatetic experimentation came back to the village. His subjects of the painting too at that time were rustic in character and dramatic in human elements” (V.R. Amberkar, Hebbar, New Delhi, 1960, p. ii).
In the present lot, an untitled portrayal of an intergenerational group of women that dates to this period, Hebbar portrays what appears to be a new bride with the closest members of her family in an intimate domestic setting. The central figure, likely the bride’s mother, tends lovingly to her bashful daughter, covering her hair with a dupatta or shawl in the traditional practice of ghoongat or veiling followed by married women. An older matriarch, seated on a low wooden stool, appears to be the master of ceremonies, looking on in approval and pride at the transmission of these cultural practices from one generation to the next.
Here, Hebbar both draws from and subverts the age-old artistic tradition of ‘la toilette’ paintings, or depictions of women’s intimate rituals of getting ready for the day. Documenting the private life and routines of noble or bourgeois women, toilette scenes were a popular genre across time and tradition. From late Renaissance tapestries, Japanese prints and Indian miniature paintings to well-known Rococo and Impressionist artworks, paintings of ladies washing and dressing, either alone or being attended to, usually catered to the male gaze, providing a voyeuristic view into spaces they did not typically have access to.
Hebbar’s adaptation of this tradition to a typically Indian context, much like Sher-Gil’s seminal 1937 painting Bride’s Toilet, which he would have been aware of at the time, eschews voyeurism for tenderness, depicting an important ritual for a new bride and the communal nature of all such rites of passage. The artist has also depicted other bridal ceremonies like the haldi and mehendi in similar works from this period.
“Hebbar's works have certain distinctive qualities such as linear rhythm, spatial harmony and expressive colours. The themes he chooses are earthy and commonplace, but his penetrating insight, sensitive temperament and consummate craftsmanship transform them into sublimity itself” (K.K. Hebbar, exhibition catalogue, New Delhi, 1993).