Vasudeo Santu Gaitonde:
Painting as Process, Painting as Life
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum presents the first museum
exhibition dedicated to the work of celebrated Indian modern painter
with V. S. Gaitonde:
Painting as Process, Painting as Life from October 24, 2014, to
February 11, 2015. The retrospective will comprise forty-five major paintings
and works on paper drawn from thirty leading public institutions and private
collections across Asia, Europe, and the United States, forming the most
comprehensive overview of Gaitonde’s work to date. As current scholarship
revisits traditions of mid-20th-century modern art outside of the Euro-American
paradigm, Gaitonde’s work presents an unparalleled opportunity to explore the
context of Indian modern art as it played out in the metropolitan centers of
Bombay (now Mumbai) and New Delhi from the late 1940s through the end of the
20th century. Featuring many works that have never been seen by the public, the
exhibition will reveal Gaitonde’s extraordinary use of color, form, and
texture, as well as symbolic elements and calligraphy, in works that seem to
glow with an inner light.
This exhibition is
supported in part by Christie’s. The Leadership Committee for V.S.
Gaitonde: Painting as Process, Painting as Life is gratefully
acknowledged for its support.
Born in Nagpur, India in 1924, Gaitonde was briefly
affiliated with avant-garde collectives such as the Progressive Artists’ Group
and the Bombay Group in the early ’50s. Nonetheless, Gaitonde remained
independent throughout most of his career, unrelated to any of the modern
groups, movements, styles, or academies that developed after 1947 in
post-Independence India. He was an artist of singular stature, known to fellow
artists and intellectuals, as well as to later generations of students and
collectors, as a man of uncompromising artistic integrity of spirit and
purpose. A stringent attachment to the codes of painting and the ethics of
being a painter distinguished his aesthetic worldview
The exhibition will draw an arc from Gaitonde’s early,
figurative, mixed-medium works and watercolors inspired by Paul Klee
(1879–1940), through his major bodies of paintings from the 1960s and ’70s
during which time he developed his signature oil works on canvas, to his late
works from the 1980s and ’90s. Gaitonde began participating in solo and group
exhibitions across India and abroad in the mid-1950s. Departing from Klee’s
agile lines, lyrical colors, and fantastical symbolist imagery, the artist
began working in the late 1950s in a nonrepresentational mode—or, as he
preferred to call it, a nonobjective style. This turn towards abstraction
coincides with Gaitonde’s lifelong interest in Zen Buddhism, and is in
accordance with the philosophy first espoused by Vasily Kandinsky (1866–1944),
as is embodied by the Guggenheim Museum’s origins as the Museum of
Non-Objective Painting. Achieving silence was constitutive in Gaitonde’s
creative process. During an interview in 1991, he equated the circle—which
appears in several of his canvases—with silence, speech with the splitting of
the circle in half, and Zen with a dot: “Everything starts from silence. The
silence of the brush. The silence of the canvas. The silence of the painting
knife. The painter starts by absorbing all these silences. You are not partial
in the sense that no one part of you is working there. Your entire being is.
Your entire being is working together with the brush, the painting knife, the
canvas to absorb that silence and create.”
Gaitonde employed palette knives and paint rollers and
often used torn pieces of newspaper and magazines to create abstract forms
through a “lift-off” technique. The resulting paintings have a sense of
weightlessness, yet their texture assures physicality and presence. His work
spans the traditions of nonobjective painting and Zen Buddhism as well as
Indian miniatures and East Asian hanging scrolls and ink paintings. This
transnational set of references and influences provides an art historical
context for Gaitonde’s work that has not yet been fully developed before this
retrospective and its accompanying catalogue. When looking at Gaitonde’s ouevre
within the wider related context of international postwar art, one can draw
parallels to artists working within the contemporary School of Paris, and
movements such as Art Informel, Tachisme, and Abstract Expressionism, and yet
continue to define his output within the particular ethos of living and working
in India, as he did throughout his lifetime. The artistic careers of Nicolas de
Staël (1914–55), Adolph Gottlieb (1903–74), Simon Hantaï (1922–2008), Ad
Reinhardt (1913–67), Mark Rothko (1903–70), and Anne Ryan (1889–1954) provide
some formal resonances to Gaitonde’s work.
V. S. Gaitonde: Painting as Process, Painting as Life will reveal
Gaitonde as a seminal colorist whose career remains unequaled in the history of
South Asian modern art. As Indian critic Dnyaneshwar Nadkarni has stated,
Gaitonde’s “independent-mindedness was accompanied by a firm belief in his
identity as a painter.” The artist often spent months conceiving a new work but
allowed for accident and play to ultimately inform the making of his art. Never
prolific, Gaitonde is known to have made only five or six paintings a year,
given his lengthy process of conceptualization. An emphasis on process, a
masterful handling of color, structure, texture, and light, and an intuitive
understanding of how these forces alter perception, are all testaments to
Gaitonde’s unwavering commitment to his craft. (Text:
Guggenheim.org)