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Lot Essay
Over the past several years, vivid colour and an extroverted expression of the senses have disappeared from my canvases. I have been seduced by a palette of broken tones … by a visible search for a more distilled essence. I think that so much more can be said by the half-tone than by the blatancy of primary colour … I prefer to haunt a mysterious world of veiled lights and sudden discoveries.
- Jehangir Sabavala
The 1960s were a profoundly transformative period in Jehangir Sabavala’s oeuvre. Over the course of this decade, the artist subjected his visual vocabulary to uncompromising scrutiny, constantly clarifying and refining it. This new, determined focus produced some of the artist’s finest work, leading his biographer Ranjit Hoskote to describe his paintings from the period as “visionary landscapes” that transcended familiar subjects and genres becoming “site[s] of epiphany”. Moving away from the formal principles of Cubism and the bright colors he had experimented with in the late 1950s, Sabavala turned to a more personal language and restrained palette that responded to his surroundings in India. The work of Lyonel Feininger provided critical direction in this shift. As he noted, “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” (Artist statement, R. Hoskote, The Crucible of Painting: The Art of Jehangir Sabavala, Mumbai, 2005, p. 89, 95).
The present lot, a tranquil seascape from 1967 titled The Sand-Bank, represents the apogee of Sabavala’s quest for a new, sophisticated yet deeply personal idiom. Inspired by the rugged Western coastline of India and the view out to sea from his own apartment in Bombay, here the artist portrays an isthmus of sand, exposed by the withdrawn tide, on which two fishing boats have been pulled up to rest. Shallow pools of water on each side of the sandbar and the vast expanse of the Arabian Sea beyond it reflect the subtly graded bands of color of the sky and the hilly outcrops of Uran on the mainland that dot the horizon. Masterfully deploying pigment with delicately varied opacities and textures, the artist invites viewers into the serene world he creates, offering a place of refuge and reflection to escape the pressures and anxieties of everyday life.
In addition to Feininger, Sabavala’s luminescent land and seascapes from this period, with their diffused light and burnished layers of translucent paint, also pay homage to J.M.W. Turner and Caspar David Friedrich, whose work he greatly admired. “At the level of immediate sensation, we are struck by the obvious physical beauty of the painting as product, process and parallel reality. And as we enter Sabavala’s spaces, with trepidation, to inhabit them, we apprehend their disquieting melancholy and their restful tranquility; the paradox underscores the artist’s uncertainty about his place in the universe, his exploration of an infinity that can be measured only in mirages, illuminated only through mystery” (R. Hoskote, Ibid., 2005, p. 109).
The Sand-Bank was first exhibited in 1969 by Gallery Chemould at Jehangir Art Gallery in Bombay. The show then traveled to the Commonwealth Institutes of England and Scotland, in a triumphant return to Europe for Sabavala a decade after completing his studies there. Writing about this exhibition, the critic Dnyaneshwar Nadkarni noted that it included “work primarily based on an intensely personal study of the Indian landscape. But it eschews both realism and impressionism in an effort to catch the distilled essence of typically Indian skies and topography. Studying the myriad colour patterns of a changing horizon, Sabavala tries to invest the scene – whether it be a phalanx of wood-studded mountains, a lush green field or an estuary with a hint of sailing boats in the distance – with a metaphysical awareness” (D. Nadkarni, ‘Foreword’, Jehangir Sabavala, Bombay, 1969, unpaginated).
This painting was acquired after the London leg of the 1969 exhibition by Guy and Sheila Simmons, who were great friends of the artist and his wife Shirin, and has remained in their family collection since then. The Simmons met the Sabavalas through common friends in Bombay, where Guy was posted as a diplomat from 1958-1960. Sharing intellectual and artistic interests as well their cosmopolitan outlook, the two couples built a strong, lasting friendship. Over the next decade and a few more postings in the Subcontinent, the families saw each other regularly in Bombay, and also in Delhi and London when Shirin, Jehangir and their daughter Aafreed traveled there. After the Simmons left India, they kept in in touch with the Sabavalas through letters and news from mutual friends, and met during visits to India in the 1970s and 80s. Proudly displayed in their homes over various postings for more than five decades, The Sand-Bank is testament to the important place India held in their lives, and to the warm relationship the families shared that transcended time and national borders. In one of Sabavala’s last letters to his “old and dear friends” the Simmons, dated only a few months before he died, the artist reminisces about the painting, highlighting its importance in his oeuvre and providing a record of its provenance for their children.
- Jehangir Sabavala
The 1960s were a profoundly transformative period in Jehangir Sabavala’s oeuvre. Over the course of this decade, the artist subjected his visual vocabulary to uncompromising scrutiny, constantly clarifying and refining it. This new, determined focus produced some of the artist’s finest work, leading his biographer Ranjit Hoskote to describe his paintings from the period as “visionary landscapes” that transcended familiar subjects and genres becoming “site[s] of epiphany”. Moving away from the formal principles of Cubism and the bright colors he had experimented with in the late 1950s, Sabavala turned to a more personal language and restrained palette that responded to his surroundings in India. The work of Lyonel Feininger provided critical direction in this shift. As he noted, “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” (Artist statement, R. Hoskote, The Crucible of Painting: The Art of Jehangir Sabavala, Mumbai, 2005, p. 89, 95).
The present lot, a tranquil seascape from 1967 titled The Sand-Bank, represents the apogee of Sabavala’s quest for a new, sophisticated yet deeply personal idiom. Inspired by the rugged Western coastline of India and the view out to sea from his own apartment in Bombay, here the artist portrays an isthmus of sand, exposed by the withdrawn tide, on which two fishing boats have been pulled up to rest. Shallow pools of water on each side of the sandbar and the vast expanse of the Arabian Sea beyond it reflect the subtly graded bands of color of the sky and the hilly outcrops of Uran on the mainland that dot the horizon. Masterfully deploying pigment with delicately varied opacities and textures, the artist invites viewers into the serene world he creates, offering a place of refuge and reflection to escape the pressures and anxieties of everyday life.
In addition to Feininger, Sabavala’s luminescent land and seascapes from this period, with their diffused light and burnished layers of translucent paint, also pay homage to J.M.W. Turner and Caspar David Friedrich, whose work he greatly admired. “At the level of immediate sensation, we are struck by the obvious physical beauty of the painting as product, process and parallel reality. And as we enter Sabavala’s spaces, with trepidation, to inhabit them, we apprehend their disquieting melancholy and their restful tranquility; the paradox underscores the artist’s uncertainty about his place in the universe, his exploration of an infinity that can be measured only in mirages, illuminated only through mystery” (R. Hoskote, Ibid., 2005, p. 109).
The Sand-Bank was first exhibited in 1969 by Gallery Chemould at Jehangir Art Gallery in Bombay. The show then traveled to the Commonwealth Institutes of England and Scotland, in a triumphant return to Europe for Sabavala a decade after completing his studies there. Writing about this exhibition, the critic Dnyaneshwar Nadkarni noted that it included “work primarily based on an intensely personal study of the Indian landscape. But it eschews both realism and impressionism in an effort to catch the distilled essence of typically Indian skies and topography. Studying the myriad colour patterns of a changing horizon, Sabavala tries to invest the scene – whether it be a phalanx of wood-studded mountains, a lush green field or an estuary with a hint of sailing boats in the distance – with a metaphysical awareness” (D. Nadkarni, ‘Foreword’, Jehangir Sabavala, Bombay, 1969, unpaginated).
This painting was acquired after the London leg of the 1969 exhibition by Guy and Sheila Simmons, who were great friends of the artist and his wife Shirin, and has remained in their family collection since then. The Simmons met the Sabavalas through common friends in Bombay, where Guy was posted as a diplomat from 1958-1960. Sharing intellectual and artistic interests as well their cosmopolitan outlook, the two couples built a strong, lasting friendship. Over the next decade and a few more postings in the Subcontinent, the families saw each other regularly in Bombay, and also in Delhi and London when Shirin, Jehangir and their daughter Aafreed traveled there. After the Simmons left India, they kept in in touch with the Sabavalas through letters and news from mutual friends, and met during visits to India in the 1970s and 80s. Proudly displayed in their homes over various postings for more than five decades, The Sand-Bank is testament to the important place India held in their lives, and to the warm relationship the families shared that transcended time and national borders. In one of Sabavala’s last letters to his “old and dear friends” the Simmons, dated only a few months before he died, the artist reminisces about the painting, highlighting its importance in his oeuvre and providing a record of its provenance for their children.