Limited Edition Serigraphs

JEHANGIR SABAVALA
Limited Edition Serigraphs
Published by
JEHANGIR SABAVALA
 The Serigraph Studio
presents

Limited Edition Serigraphs

by

JEHANGIR SABAVALA

2008
 Experiences of Grace, States of Illumination:
The Paintings of Jehangir Sabavala
Ranjit Hoskote

A
portfolio is, literally, a collection of leaves that you can several decades, a privilege that has informed the critical
carry with you. The word is veined with the pleasures biography and the retrospective study of Sabavala that I have
of selecting a favourite image, dwelling on an published, as well as the lifetime retrospective of his work that
intriguing detail, juxtaposing images from different periods in I curated for the National Gallery of Modern Art. To view this
an artist’s career to produce a visual narrative that is richly distinguished artist in the amplitude of his painterly journey is
multi-dimensional. Like a miniature retrospective, a suite of to bear witness to sixty years of questing. Sabavala has never
limited edition serigraphs such as the present one, can been the hostage of fashion, the voice of ideology or the
represent the entire gamut of an artist’s contribution and evoke tactician of political necessity. At his own measured pace,
the span of his artistic career. The images that comprise this working a lode on his own, without reference to schools, groups
selection demonstrate the inner logic of Jehangir Sabavala’s and movements, he has logged in a graceful progression from
aesthetic development and the changing nature of his one key theme to the next, one formal discovery to another.
responses to the complexities of self, society, ethnic ancestry The art of his maturity holds within it the reflexes of his
and artistic context. A prominent member of the first apprenticeship to the grand tradition of European art and his
generation of postcolonial Indian artists, Sabavala is one of the training in the dominant styles of modernism, as well as the
pioneers who first developed a painterly idiom that was attuned experience of passing through periods of meticulous self-
to the international languages of art-making yet sensitive to questioning and the testing of alternatives.
the textures of local culture and visual capability.
Sabavala’s handling of the primary elements of light, colour
The present images stand in an intriguing relationship to the and texture has changed, at first almost imperceptibly and then
paintings on which they are based: they are not exact more dramatically, over the decades. The hard, even
reproductions, but have been slightly modified by the artist aggressively definite and form-enclosing line of his early work
through digital means, in consultation with the Serigraph has given way to suffusions of radiance that hint at the
Studio, the final images being produced by the screen-printing openness and limitless expanse of the infinite. The relationship
technique. The accelerated growth of the Indian art market between glazed surface and underlying structure has been
during the last few years, welcome as it is from an economic as determined, variously, by the rigours of pictorial grammar and
well as a cultural viewpoint, has tended to put the works of the impulse towards fantasia. His early bright palette has
modern masters like Sabavala beyond the reach of many yielded before subtle, fractured tonalities; the schematic
serious collectors. In such a situation, initiatives such as this evocation of the actual scene has been transmuted into the
limited edition serve to present a novel form of image, to shimmering reverie, the imagined vista. And once again, in
amplify the ongoing conversation about Indian art, and to recent years, he has turned to brilliant colour, hard-edged
expand the collector base that sustains this domain of image- figures, the interplay of angle, plane, shimmer and destiny.
making activity. Through all these changes, Sabavala’s paintings have
preserved an introspective, melancholy lyricism, as well as the
ache of the Sublime. These paintings are tinted by a nostalgia,
as for moments once possessed, for homelands once known
The magic of Jehangir Sabavala’s art remains inexhaustible; and now forever beyond the horizon of what can be known.
and I can say this with some authority, having known his art for Such is the aura that plays around the edges of Sabavala’s

3
works, evoking in the viewer an awareness of transient beauty academic art to which it subscribed; in Leger’s Utopian world- across the years, and has scrupulously preserved the books wonderment in the face of the world which imparts to our lives
and imminent epiphany. There is, in each successive phase of view, it embodied the transfiguration of the spirit through that he maintains for visitors’ remarks during every exhibition). whatever ultimate meaning they have. He appreciates the
Sabavala’s career, a persistence of earlier concerns: an technological progress and perfect design. Sabavala was And finally, a location, in cultural terms, for his displaced self: mystical experience, without losing the sceptical edge of
anticipation of future consummations; an emancipation of attracted, not to the residual ideological content of Cubism, but this would involve a deep analysis of motive and position; it reason.
trapped possibilities; a patterning of departures. to its formal discipline. Cubism ingrained in him a firm would mean an acceptance and even a joyous embracing of the
After the mid-1960s, Sabavala summons forth a procession of
appreciation of light and structure; but it constrained him as he romanticism of deep, rich, warm tropical colour, without a
exiles and pilgrims in his paintings; and as they traverse the
forged ahead and grew into an acceptance of a deep-seated renunciation of the crystalline classical grasp of structure; it
unbounded distances towards a once and future homeland, he
classicising tendency within himself. The truth is that he was would allow Sabavala to engage with harbour and marketplace
traces the stations of their quest. We have here the tragic
Sabavala belongs to a family that is legendary for its patronage never, as some observers believe, a Cubist; he adapted the and streetside, without having to abandon the mountain, the vision of a spiritual homelessness; at the zenith of its calm
of the arts in Bombay; he marked a piquant innovation within style for his own purposes, and it became one among the cloud and the watershed. In other words, it has been grief, it approaches and turns over into its opposite, a
its ranks, as a young man, by choosing to become a tributaries that nourished the river of his development. Sabavala’s fortune to be able to tap that longed-for process of celebration of pantheistic luminosity, of the divine effulgence
practitioner rather than a sponsor of the arts. He spent the organic growth which Jung has described as the marriage of before which the human must necessarily fade. In this
shadowed years of World War II studying at Elphinstone consciousness and life. realisation lies the possibility that the exile and the pilgrim may
College and the Sir Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy School of Art in the
recover the alchemical powers of healing and communion: it is
city of his birth, and left for London as soon as the global Sabavala returned to Bombay from Paris in the early 1950s,
then that the exile-pilgrim becomes the sorcerer. The lyrical
conflict came to an end. He was 23, and his ambition was to exchanging a Europe recovering from World War II for an India
tendency, apt by its nature to overflow, is modulated through
become an actor. Once in London, he quickly realised that emerging from colonial rule. Having decided to conduct his
The major breakthrough in Sabavala’s artistic development the stringent organising faculty that Sabavala brings to his
painting, rather than theatre, was his true métier. He joined the artistic career in the newly independent Republic, he applied
Heatherley School of Art to master the techniques of genre occurred in the mid-1960s, once he had begun to question the work: from this emerges the delicate beauty, at once intimate
himself to modulating the universal languages of modernism
and the secrets of vision that the tradition of Western art value of his mannered improvisations within what I have and remote, of the winged horizons and deserted strands, the
that he had acquired, to convey the immediacies of his local
offered; a few years later, he moved to Paris to study with elsewhere termed a ‘tropicalised Cubism’. Energies and distant cliffs and soundless waterfalls that so intrigue and
context. On making this fundamental decision to return home,
various teachers, the most important of them, for his emotional impulses that had lain dormant in his consciousness captivate us, in Sabavala’s paintings.
he accepted the aesthetic concomitants attendant on it: he
development, was the Cubist academician André Lhote. The for several decades were released. The neat unfolding of his
took upon himself the project of self-renewal, of re-inventing
measured choreography of Sabavala’s figurative paintings and images was disrupted by the sudden manifestation of the
the self. Despite his pervasive sense of being an alien
the exquisite mise-en-scene of his landscapes are the only visionary landscape. In his magisterial canvases of the 1960s
everywhere, although at home in the world Sabavala has
evidence pointing to his youthful fascination for the stage. and 1970s, the Alpine lakes and Deccan scarp of his childhood, Despite the primacy of landscape, the figure has persisted in
always been proud of his Indian identity: he saw, at once, the
need to articulate a clearer relationship with the Indian the banks of the Tungabhadra that he had driven along, as well Sabavala’s art as an idealised archetype. His preferred figure is
The future direction of Sabavala’s art, with its periodic shifts of
lifeworld, its colours, textures and densities. He was sharply as the southern seas he had sailed, were all transmuted into the visitant: the fiery angel, the man arriving by sea, the
emphasis, is prefigured in this European programme of
aware of the fact that he had not simply returned to the crystalline topographies of the spirit. These paintings were messenger from another world. The otherness of such beings is
preparation. His art is defined by the interplay between
subcontinent; but rather, and more crucially, to a nation-state illuminated from within rather than from without; they were balanced, however, by the weaving of one form into another
structure and immediacy, reason and passion: the key formal
that had paid for its liberation from the British Empire with the hymns to infinity and eternity. through a sleight of charcoal and brush: the man becomes a
problem he set for himself, early in his career, was that of
reconciling a Cubist geometrical austerity with a festively trauma of the Partition. From the evidence of this artistic trajectory, it appears that tree, the body a peak, the skin of water a rushing cloak. In
Impressionist pleasure in light and colour. A key element in any Sabavala’s intelligence has gradually been drawn to a religious Sabavala’s recent work, this interweaving of figure and
In retrospect, we recognise that Sabavala, as an actor in the
discussion of his painterly transitions – his shifts of formal view of the universe. This may seem a controversial description landscape has grown insistent and powerful: as though,
cultural turmoil of the late 1950s, organised three discourses of
concern, thematic preoccupation, stylistic charter – is the through the geometer’s planar intricacies and the sensualist’s
negotiation with his immediate environment – at first by trial for so secular-minded a person as Sabavala. But religion, to
tension, within his sensibility, between a movement towards tonal play, the artist were trying to bring nature and the human
and error, and then in a more concerted fashion. First, a him, does not denote the outward aspect of peremptory dogma
the past and a movement towards the future. will into harmony.
pictorial language of reconciliation with the place. Second, a and ritual, the worship of idols or the repetition of prayers. It
Sabavala’s relationship with the idiom and ideology of Cubism ‘legibility’ vis a vis his own people, that is, a style whose connotes, rather, the recognition of the transcendent dimension The most distinctive feature of Sabavala’s practice is his
is a troubled one. We ask ourselves how he responded to, and conventions could be apprehended by a subcontinental of life; a sense of the aura of eternity, which touches us most continuing devotion to the classical ideals of beauty and
re-crafted for his own purposes, a style that originated in a audience (Sabavala has always been extremely attentive to the closely yet remains so distant that we cannot aspire to it by serenity, however threatened they may be in a period of
Machine Age technique of vision. Cubism, for Picasso, was a opinion of the ‘man in the street’, who is not a cliché of the any means more physical than poetry. Religion, to Sabavala, is absolute war, programmed genocide and forced migration,
revolution against the stasis of bourgeois society and the smug newspapers to him; he recalls conversations with viewers not the prison of a belief system. To him, it signifies that when human experience has pushed art towards the extreme

4 5
conditions of the sublime and the grotesque, the terrifying and fissile and fugitive elements of experience into a mosaic,
the horrible. To Sabavala, beauty remains an experience of conducts the visible in the direction of the visionary. This
grace to be cherished, a state of illumination that gives us the tendency towards classicism is more than a conscious strategy
strength to endure existence. for Jehangir Sabavala; it springs from a need to regulate the
contingencies of existence, the contradictions of a versatile
His paintings of the early 21st century emphasise that
self, and the vagaries of a capricious history.
Sabavala’s art derives its crucial tension from the dialectic
between the actual and the idealised: his paintings come to life
in the conceptual region between mutable terrain and timeless
landscape, raw body and stylised figure, ephemeral flowers and
eternal still life. The principal device by which Sabavala References
transmutes and idealises the forms of nature in his paintings is Ranjit Hoskote, Pilgrim, Exile, Sorcerer: The Painterly Evolution of Jehangir
a crystalline geometry, which dissolves bodies, objects and Sabavala (Bombay: Eminence Designs, 1998)
geographies, and re-constitutes them as prismatic structures. Ranjit Hoskote, The Crucible of Painting: The Art of Jehangir Sabavala
By re-arranging reality into composition, he re-formats the (Bombay: Eminence Designs/ National Gallery of Modern Art, 2005)

Ranjit Hoskote is a cultural theorist, art critic, independent curator and poet. He is the author of eleven
books, including five studies of art and artists, four collections of poetry, an edited anthology of
contemporary verse, and a translation. These publications include a critical biography as well as a
retrospective study of Jehangir Sabavala. The most recent of Hoskote’s publications are Vanishing Acts:
New & Selected Poems 1985-2005 (Penguin, New Delhi 2006), Baiju Parthan: A User’s Manual
(Afterimage, Bombay 2006) and The Dancer on the Horse: Reflections on the Art of Iranna GR (Lund
Humphries/ Ashgate, London 2007). Hoskote has curated twelve exhibitions, including a lifetime
retrospective of Jehangir Sabavala for the National Gallery of Modern Art, Bombay and New Delhi
(2005), and a mid-career retrospective of Atul Dodiya (2001) for the Japan Foundation, Tokyo.

6
‘At the Desert’s Edge’ (1975)

Surveying his landscapes of the 1960s and 1970s, Sabavala admits that, despite his multi-
cultural predilection for the exuberance of the French and Italian countryside, it is the soil
of India that moored these paintings: “I seem more drawn to the sea and sky of the
western seaboard and to the ridges and dunes of our desert areas. To the arid wastes of
Rajasthan where all is adobe-coloured, and land and sky merge into one, but no focal point
is ever lost.” In the cinematic-seeming ‘At the Desert’s Edge’ (1975), Sabavala combines
the felicity of an Antonioni with an attentiveness to the rhythms of labour and repose. His
figures, shown at rest, speak of work and wandering; the pause they wait upon seems to
have come at the end of a long period of travail, or marks the beginning of another bout of
combat with the elements.

Paper size : 22" x 30"

Composition size : 17" x 24"
Paper : Somerset 250 gsm
Edition size : 125

8 9
‘The Wandering Shades II’ (2003)

‘The Wandering Shades II’ (2003) gathers together several threads in Sabavala’s art: it
fuses the wandering pilgrims of his 1970s paintings, envoys of lost tribes and nomadic
populations, with the intimate yet operatic visitants that entered his frames during the
1980s. They gesture and sing silently to the moon; they speak of stars that have died but
continue to transmit their light across the vast distances of space; they bear augury and
disquiet yet also the promise of repose. The form and stance of these “extra-terrestrials”,
as the artist calls them – visitors from other worlds, who arrive in radiance and mystery
–owes much to Botticelli; but a little, also, to Chirico’s masked or faceless protagonists in
their blank piazzas, and to the Bengal School’s evocations of the Bodhisattvas of Ajanta.

Paper size : 30" x 22"

Composition size : 24" x 16"
Paper : Somerset 250 gsm
Edition size : 125

10 11
‘The Stranger I’ (1990)

‘The Stranger I’ is an incarnation of the fire principle. He commands a beach on which he

appears to have only just made landfall, its drifts of marbled sand pricked with clumps of
agave. His robe, seemingly made of flame, billows around him like a sail or canopy. Red
and amethyst mountains rise up behind him, breakers frozen in mid-surge, and the radiant
cloud that serves him as backcloth also invests him with effulgence. The genealogy of this
magisterial figure includes Botticelli’s Venus arising from the ocean as well as the risen
Christ immortalised by numerous Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque interpretations of the
sacred theme of the Resurrection. ‘The Stranger I’ also draws upon the Bengal School’s
dream-like evocations of the Bodhisattvas of Ajanta. A sumptuous yet sombre phantasm,
he takes his place in the gallery of ‘visitants’ that Sabavala has painted since the 1980s.
They arrive robed in radiance and mystery, emissaries from other worlds, other planes
of consciousness.

Paper size : 32" x 30"

Composition size : 24" x 24"
Paper : Somerset 300 gsm
Edition size : 125

12 13
‘The Friends’ (1983)

Sabavala’s ‘Purdah Women’, and their associated choric arrangements of women, bring
back to mind Cartier-Bresson’s exquisite photographs of Kashmiri Muslim women taken in
1947, figures that are almost mythic in their power and yet portrayed in everyday settings;
the eye rests on their pleated robes and veils, their gestures of prayer or communication. It
is possible that the memory of this suite of images, which Sabavala admires, informed his
‘Purdah’ series. In ‘The Friends’, the artist establishes a pleasing visual rhyme of heads
turning, hands poised and legs stepping in synchrony, almost as though the simple act of
women walking to the market in a village in the Himalayan foothills had been transformed
into the ceremonial procession of fashion models down a catwalk.

Paper size : 44" x 30"

Composition size : 32" x 24"
Paper : Somerset 300 gsm
Edition size : 125

14 15
‘The Sorcerer II’ (2003)

In ‘The Sorcerer II’ (2003), Sabavala takes over the techniques of photography: this
painting is a close-up, time-lapse, double-exposure revisiting of one of his most moving
works, ‘The Sorcerer’ (1989). In both paintings, the austere phantasm of a wizard, robed in
topaz and purple, throws out his arm in a curse. All around, the lakes harden into rock,
while two trees take the brunt of the malediction. With entwined trunks, like twin pythons,
their foliage like mottled clouds, they stand – cursed, created. In this bivalent moment of
negation and affirmation, a moment that is maimed and gloried all at once, the wizard
stands revealed as the painter himself. As an allegorical self-portrait, this vista of the
fabulist and his enchantment marks an impressive mutation of dormant images: the
sorcerer incarnates the protagonists of Sabavala’s japonisme phase of the 1950s, his
appearance being partly of Kabuki provenance and partly a debt to Aubrey Beardsley.

Paper size : 30" x 44"

Composition size : 24" x 33"
Paper : Somerset 300 gsm
Edition size : 125

16 17
‘Purdah I’ (1982)

Sabavala is, by temperament, oriented towards withdrawal and retreat. He desires to enter
another order of being where vespers and matins, the offices comprising sheaves upon
sheaves of psalms, calibrate the magical hours of silence and create new forms of
attention to the word and the world. And in his paintings, it is the repose of liturgical time,
rather than the restlessness of its horological counterpart, that we experience: the sense
of duration envelops us, and time itself has become the space of our effort.

In ‘Purdah I’ (1982), the artist works with another kind of cloister, with the robe and the
shell of the guarded interior space. Statuesque, monumental, partaking of the textures of
the pink terracotta walls behind them, framed against the windowed sky, the three women
in ‘Purdah I’ remain ethereal, almost floating above the steps that ground them and earth
their electricities. As though officiating at some secret rite, at the threshold of speech,
these women glide forth from their cloisters: the swaddling, placental volume of the
burnous cannot hide the determination of the limbs, nor can the veil mask the face.

Paper size : 30" x 22"

Composition size : 24" x 17"
Paper : Somerset 250 gsm
Edition size : 125

18 19
‘The Sorrowing Men’ (1974)

How do individuals who have renounced human attachments in their quest for
transcendence express grief when confronted with loss? Sabavala dwells on the emotional
complexity of such a moment in ‘The Sorrowing Men’, a drama of feeling that is signified
by gesture rather than manifest expression. The painting is dominated by three tonsured
men wearing the anchorite’s austere robes: in their unspoken mourning, the freight of
anguish collides with long-practised disciplines of restraint. The men attend a verdant
shrub: is this an ancestral tumulus, marking diaspora or massacre? Who, or what, lies
buried there? The background suggests a cave monastery, and the painting’s elegiac
browns and ivory greys are offset by the living green of the shrubbery. This palette
indicates an affinity with that of Zurbaran; and Sabavala’s elongated monastic figures,
which rhyme with the cypresses or stalagmites rising from the earth, render homage
both to the mystical El Greco and to the Buddhist visionaries of paradise who
painted Dunhuang.

Paper size : 44" x 30"

Composition size : 31" x 24"
Paper : Somerset 300 gsm
Edition size : 125

20 21
‘Pilgrimage II’ (1996)

From the late 1960s onwards, Sabavala has invoked the train of pilgrims, who conduct their
doubts and yearnings through a terrain of crags and waterfalls, caves and abysses, deserts
and mirages, on their way to the receding horizon. Sabavala, as stage designer, lavishes his
love of ceremonial and drama on the arrangement of the visual stresses in such paintings
as ‘Pilgrimage II’ (1996). In Sabavala’s paintings of the 1980s and 1990s, the universe
speaks in a voice capable of many nuances. “One is moved,” the artist says, “by the
sweep, the drama, the magnificent changeability of nature.” Transposing his interior drama
of turmoil and exhilaration onto the tide, the wind, the awesome spectacle of a storm
rending the earth open, he offers homage to the cosmos, the original creation. As a
humanist, Sabavala holds that “on this threshold of beauty and pain, man is yet the great
achiever”; and yet, the humanist dogma that man is the measure of all things can hardly be
said to lie at the core of his vision. Man’s chief achievement, in Sabavala’s paintings, has
been to arrive and depart in silence, with something of the furtive apologia of the interloper
in the grand spectacle. Sabavala’s figures seek sanctuary in a terrain that is all possible
home, even as it is all minatory fastness. As though reverting to the Indo-Iranian religion of
his ancient forebears, Sabavala affirms the sacredness of the universe: the creative and
regenerative principle of the cosmos far overshadows man and his works.

Paper size : 30" x 22"

Composition size : 24" x 16"
Paper : Somerset 250 gsm
Edition size : 125

22 23
‘The Disciples’ (1981)

A complex relationship of attraction and doubt has nourished Sabavala’s experience of

belief in a Transcendent. An umbilical connection links the sanyasins of the Bihar School of
Yoga’s Munger ashram, where the artist has sometimes retreated, to the protagonists of
‘The Sorrowing Men’ (1974) and its successor, ‘The Disciples’ (1981). It is from these seed
paintings that Sabavala’s anchorite figures of the 1980s and 1990s were to take their cue.
In ‘The Disciples’, three monks walk wrapped in stillness, each in his own inward, private
calm. The tulsi sprig in one monk’s hand, the mudras brought into being by the other
monks’ fingers, suggest a life of the soul that is constantly distilled from the life of the
body. And yet the body makes its imperious claims, rings through the confident stance of
the feet, the poise of the carriage, the nobility of the domed heads. In both paintings, the
men might be yogis, Buddhists, Essenes, or beings from some futuristic scenario: the
ideal type in Sabavala’s figuration is northern, carrying with it the tranquillity of the
Tibetan monastery of legend, or the unease of the lands exposed to Hun and Mongol
assaults, or the resilience of the mountainous frontier between the Pamir highlands and
peninsular India.

Paper size : 30" x 22"

Composition size : 24" x 17"
Paper : Somerset 250 gsm
Edition size : 125

24 25
‘The Guiding Light II’ (2004)

Sabavala has often paid pictorial homage to the figure of the beckoning prophet, the
magus who tracks the star of prophecy, and the musician-sage who sings of the glories to
come through the dark night of the spirit. In ‘The Guiding Light II’ (2004), he invites us to
consider two figures who are about to be transformed by the unearthly magnificence of a
light in the firmament, neither sun nor moon, but the radiance of a transformation both
hoped for and held in awe.

Paper size : 30" x 22"

Composition size : 24" x 17"
Paper : Somerset 250 gsm
Edition size : 125

26 27
‘The Lost Tribe’ (1975)

In ‘The Lost Tribe’, Sabavala summons up the image of white-robed pilgrims or exiles
traversing a bare plain, forming a momentary focus of life in a desert of rock and petrified
bushes. Fatigue or death has brought the journey to a halt. A group within the group
huddles on the ground, weakened but secure within the envelope of community; it is only
barely protected from vaster uncertainty and hostility, from the predators of history and
nature. Sabavala demonstrates his consummate mastery over colour here, teasing a range
of moods and gradations from his deliberately muted palette of brown and white: the
painting is composed in harmonies of sienna, umber, ecru, taupe, tan, cream and chalk.
‘The Lost Tribe’ rises in parallel strata: first rocks, dunes and shrubs; above them, receding
horizons; higher still, snow-capped peaks and mountain-like clouds; and in the sky,
minatory birds, their wings spread wide above their potential prey, circling above the lost
tribe like great clouds.

Paper size : 30" x 44"

Composition size : 24" x 32"
Paper : Somerset 300 gsm
Edition size : 125

28 29
Between the Plain and the Precipice: menagerie of dogs ensconced in their baskets, a variety of birds and Siamese cats,
seal point or chocolate point. And wherever we went, mother dragged us into the
Jehangir Sabavala’s Art of Travel galleries and the museums, the Louvre in Paris, the National Gallery and the Tate
in London, the Prado in Madrid and the Uffizi in Florence. Bellini, Veronese,
Nancy Adajania
Tintoretto, Zurbaran, Greco, Rubens, Rembrandt, Delacroix, Gericault and the
Impressionists followed us like ghosts on our travels.

In Jehangir Sabavala’s paintings, we interact with different personae: those of an I was always interested in meeting people from other backgrounds. Being
alchemist, a monk, a visitant, a pilgrim, a refugee, a mystic; or the veiled figure Zoroastrian didn’t mean that I was partial only to Parsis, What was important was
whose identity will always remain a mystery. These questing figures, painted forging a sympathetic bond with people, as we did in Ceylon and elsewhere. In
against enchanted, spectral landscapes, are bewitching projections of Sabavala’s Ceylon we visited the marvellous sites of Sigiriya and Anuradhapura. My eyes
personality. Although his landscapes are departures from actual geographical instinctively searched the landscape: the clouds, the trees, plants and snakes, and
sites – it could be the Sahyadris or Lac Leman – they are essentially private
the perverse lure of the fall over the great precipice.
conundrums where the universal drama of exile, loss and longing is performed. In
the course of this conversation, we spend an evening travelling into the
NA: One of the people you bonded with as a teenager seems to have been an Italian prisoner-of-
landscapes of the past, haunted by the bleached aura of distance, and of the
war. I am speaking of your handsome portrait sketched in the early 1940s. How did this
future, coming to birth in the artist’s eye.
encounter transpire?

JS: I met him in Ahmednagar with ENSA, a group put together by the British, of
Nancy Adajania: There was a time when the art of travel was oriented towards an amplification
young people who could entertain the troops and the prisoners-of-war who were
of the self, the refinement of the spirit, especially for an artist of your privileged background. Today
being rehabilitated at the hospital. The former were to be shipped out to their
travel is computed in frequent flier miles and marathonic canvas races organised by art camps.
As a painter of sublime landscapes, of land-locked seas and cavernous mountains, of petrified postings, the latter to be eventually repatriated. We were selected for showing
trees and simmering volcanoes, what are your earliest memories of travel to distant and not-so some talent at singing or dancing. You were booed or given a glad eye if you were
distant lands? pretty [laughs mischievously]. The Italian asked me to sit for him. The Indian talent
was mainly drawn from Parsis and Christians – and the resident English helped out
Jehangir Sabavala: One was truly privileged to indulge in pure travel. There was
– but not from the others. I don’t know why.
no coercion, no deadlines and if there were any, we happily broke them as children.
My brother Sharokh and I spent months in Matheran, the Sahyadris, the Nilgiris
and the Palni hills. We never stepped into the gymkhanas of those places, the NA: That is because the Parsis were a comprador elite in the British Raj and as Ranjit Hoskote
other boys and girls thought we were snobbish, but I could not participate in their says in his critical biography on you, they were dwibhashis, the pragmatic two-tongued ones who
silly competitive games, instead we spent time talking, trekking and looking, and knew how to speak the language appropriate to the occasion. Paradoxically, the wealth some of
meeting the local people. We went on magnificent walks into the valleys, tried to them made from the opium trade was used for setting up charities, money was donated not only to
make contact with the people and gathered knowledge of the rich flora and fauna. the Parsi community but also to demobbed soldiers of all nationalities and Sanskrit scholars, as
well as to educational and medical institutions. [1]

NA: You had a natural curiosity towards your environment and bonded easily with strangers, even
JS: That’s true. Mother did charitable work for her own community, as well as for
though at the core you were a lonely child.
others. She set up ‘Swabal’, a chain of cooperative stores to promote self-reliance
JS: As a child, I would play by myself, devise my own games and make my own and dignity of labour among poor Parsis, especially young, unqualified Parsi males.
rules. I outlined my own little world and planned it for myself. It wasn’t a very There was instant opposition to the scheme from both sexes, especially from men
happy home, my parents eventually separated. Father was keen on politics but did who felt it demeaning to undertake such work. So, to set an example, it was
not succeed in it. Mother was a maverick, she yanked us in and out of school and Mother herself who swept the floors of the shop clean. Subsequently, a ‘Swabal’
we spent months on end happily travelling with a retinue of servants and a chain was established in Bombay, successfully.

30 31
NA: The gifted child is almost always solitary, don’t you think? had training and technique enough to sail through socially speaking. But most
importantly: How would I be accepted as a painter? How would I integrate myself
JS: I was different. I did not like the rough and tumble of rugger, football and
via my work into this young new republic of India?
hockey. I was the butt of attack because of my looks. But equally because of my
background, somehow it was the foreign teachers who treated me like one
of themselves. NA: Nilima Sheikh in her essay in the art journal Vrishchik, 1973, alludes to this very problem,
your inability to integrate Cubist style with your own environment. She writes: “There is
I was a solitary child. I was bored to death in class. The teachers used to complain absolutely no harm in subscribing to the devices of Western art or traditional Indian
that the other children were distracted because of me. In my Swiss school in painting.…But whether they guarantee the same conviction in a changed environment is a
Montreux, my eyes were inevitably fixed on the enchanted garden outside the problem the modern painter here is constantly faced with. The problem [arises] …when a painter
class and the still exquisite beauty of Lac Leman. In Les Avants, the village above like Jehangir Sabavala tries to impose the devices of Cubism on pastoral scenes….”
Montreux, I received private education in the broadest sense from my Anglo-
Burmese tutor Ronald Fischer of Dulwich College. Here I did not have to fit into a JS: The Hungarian art historian Charles Fabri woke me up. I realised that emotion
formal academic pattern, which suited me admirably. But this was an exceptional and feeling had to enter my work. I was looking for a breakthrough that would take
phase in my dreary school life. Incidentally, I once by accident almost shot my precedence over technique and school. You should be conscious of what you
instructor at the Cathedral School’s rifle range. are doing, but if you are self-conscious, then the stance is artificial and disaster
awaits you.
NA: Did the panoramic landscapes of tropical profusions, fissures and placid lakes work as a
Hide-and-seek in public has to be intelligently handled. Was I frightened to make
release, a foil to your loneliness?
the breakthrough? No, I knew that it was correct and important. Work and
JS: As I said before, it was not a happy home and there were tremendous experimentation do not frighten me at all. However, feedback is very important.
tensions. The landscape served as an escape, a liberation from pain. Father was You get nothing from people who you should be able to talk to. If I attempt a
under strain and went to a clinic in Vienna. Remember that the influence of Freud conversation with my peers, the persona seems to come in the way. The persona
was relatively young, but pronounced, in those days. has to be integrated with your work and social presence, otherwise it is like
play-acting.
NA: Did private pain and a natural reticence lead you to wearing masks? I mean mask in the
Jungian sense, that is, of assuming different personae to deal with the world. Your friend of many
NA: How did you relate to the changed India on your return from Paris in 1951, where you were
years, Richard Lannoy, has astutely observed that, “It is the sheer difficulty of finding the you
exposed to Impressionism and Cubism?
(Shirin and Jehangir) in both of you, because one trait you practice to perfection – that is the
subtle art of being oblique, understated, allusive. Your social self, the mask you put on for social JS: Figures in India lent themselves to Cubism, our sharp light helped. My mentor
occasions, is a very elaborately wrought item, as if straight from the workshop of the finest André Lhote’s teachings came alive. For instance ‘A Shop in Jaipur’, which I
Renaissance or Baroque or Mughal goldsmith!” [2] painted in the 1950s, is composed of triangles and cubes, sharp-edged, but
I ask you then, Jehangir what if the persona becomes you, and does not allow the growth of the self? forming a whole without obscuring the figuration.
Can it happen that the mask might become the true self, over time? Or that one becomes what
others think one is? How do you preserve the secret life of the spirit behind the mask? NA: The cowled figure in the foreground of ‘A Shop in Jaipur’ and in the mid-ground of the
‘Pavement Dwellers‘, 1956, reappears as a visitant, a stand of trees, or a purdah woman. The
JS: Eventually, you reveal yourself through your paintings. I realised that I have to
veiled figure is also pared down to a notation against the immenseness of nature. Does this figure
be firmly engaged with my chosen profession – and that it was not only my
serve your need for secrecy?
paintings, but also myself that was on display. And so the mask had its uses. But
the mask was not fake, it also communicated a strong aspect of one’s personality. JS: Perhaps not consciously, but now that you put it this way, may be it has to do
When we returned to India, we wanted to present ourselves with our plus points with the fact that, although I do interact with the press and the public, deep down I
and our minuses and be accepted by India. Whether one was accepted or not, one have the need to be distinctly private.

32 33
NA: When did the first stirrings of an idealised landscape occur in your painting? Was it in ‘In time, I have returned often and again to monumental figures in heavy drapes which
the World’s Afterlight’, 1966, that you softened the contours of a razor-sharp Cubism to a give volume to the body. Take the sari for instance, it is infinitely mysterious. Or
broken palette? look at my ‘Purdah Women’ from the early 80s, they are not the conventionally
perceived veiled figures. They form a bastion, ranged as they are like an army.
JS: I personalised my painting with ‘In the World’s Afterlight’. I didn’t care whether
it was figurative, mystic or abstract. It is not a happy painting. There’s mystery,
depth, a seeming tranquillity with a strain of disquiet. Earlier I was afraid to let the NA: Are you metaphorically magnifying their regimented lives?
viewer into my world. Fabri said: “Don’t be afraid. Just express yourself and other
aspects of your personality.” Today I relate more and more to my painting, and I JS: Not all Muslim women feel suppressed under their veil. The veil could work like
don’t see the man as separate from his work. an armour against society, they can look out at the world but not be seen in return.
Today the veil is deployed as a political statement by women in Islamic countries.
NA: You were attempting to fuse the realms of the private with the painterly. ‘Darksome Hour’
made two years before ‘In the World’s Afterlight’ clearly exudes menace. Mountains sharpen their
NA: The figure in ‘Caverns Measureless to Man I’, 2004, perplexes us, we don’t know whether it
knives, a pair of blade-wings scar the night sky.
has fallen over the valley’s edge or it is floating.
JS: It is true that this painting has an apparently lyrical quality with an underlying
menace. It does not deal with a volcano bursting forth or with political issues. The JS: We can never know for sure. Caverns are frightening places. For me, they
menace is a personalised one, but distinct. represent the unpredictable and the unfathomable.

NA: An archetypal fear of the unknown is a constant ground note of your work. Could it be NA: Also, flight and death are linked in an uncanny way in your work. For me, the magnificent
related to the Parsi psyche, which is lacerated by fear, melancholia, and a persistent death wish? vulture in ‘The Predator’, 1987, does not hold menace in its claws. Instead we receive a punch of
A deep sense of loss due to exile is dramatised through the increasing isolation felt within cold fear when a gigantic tree, deadwood of many centuries bursts forth from the vulture’s wings.
the community.
JS: It’s true, the bird’s fierceness is not expressed predictably in its claws. Rather,
JS: In principle, I would say that my work is not overtly related to Zoroastrianism,
the emphasis is on the power of the wings laden with the weight of doom. I feel
but in the deep subconscious, perhaps it is. In a way it has to do with a person who
this work is emotionally charged and powerful.
belongs nowhere and yet everywhere.

NA: To move away from the twi-dark zones, ‘Sails on a Blue Day’, 1967, is a calmer although a NA: The figure of the visitant, the stranger or the mystic is of indeterminate gender. Is it a Jungian
no less intense work. During that period you had observed that you were “seduced by a palette of play of animus/anima or is it an unspoken play with sexuality?
broken tones…by a visible search for a more distilled essence”. The half tones tempered through a
palette of blue, violet, green, yellow and the shimmer of white turns the monumental sail into a JS: These androgynous strangers are perhaps, for me, more male than female, but
cloud sculpture. But the wings seem to have caught the sunlight and are gently ablaze. their sex does not matter. They provoke a sense of mystery. What is important is
the epiphany of arrival.
JS: I was influenced by Lyonel Feininger’s use of light. In ‘Sails on a Blue Day’, I
was projecting the light beyond the core of the subject, I worked on the
surrounding atmosphere to soften the hardness of my earlier figurations. NA: That is such a beautiful phrase, Jehangir. To return to the beginning of our conversation,
artists today rarely share their inter-cultural experiences with their viewers. They seem to be on
auto-pilot, bound by the Faustian logic of endless production.
NA: In ‘Lost Tribe’, 1975, an ode to political and ecological refugees, strange figures part frozen
bird, part Stonehenge, part petrified trees, stand before a landscape picked out in light and dark
JS: Today you don’t need to be wealthy to travel, globalisation has created many
planes. The light planes are wintry, the dark ones lure you to cross or rather fall through them.
opportunities for our artists to travel and consume the world. And yet when you
JS: These strange figures are at once real and not real. I have moved from more ask younger artists about their experience of confronting another culture, they are
academic solid figuration to a wraith-like, distant, ghost-like rendition. At the same evasive. You can’t get a word out of them – I wonder why.

34 35
NA: If I asked you to travel in the forest of your mind, which direction would you prefer to travel
in and who would you like to meet?

JS: To be honest, I would like to travel westwards. There are two or three people I
would like to meet. One of them is part-Japanese, part-English, she has a deep
empathy for me and my work. We write regularly to each other. The others are men
who have reached out to me. However, this is not what has happened, I seem to
have traveled in the forests and deserts of the East, essentially pursuing a
mysterious trail.

NA: If you had decided to stay on in the West, how do you think your career would have
shaped out?

JS: I don’t know what turn it would have taken, but I would not be pessimistic.
Why is it that if you are born in one country you cannot belong to another? We
belong to the world.

Notes

1. Ranjit Hoskote, Pilgrim, Exile, Sorcerer: The Painterly Evolution of Jehangir Sabavala (Bombay:
Eminence Designs, 1998), p. 25.

2. Ranjit Hoskote, The Crucible of Painting: The Art of Jehangir Sabavala (Bombay: Eminence
Designs/ National Gallery of Modern Art, 2005), p. 80.

Nancy Adajania is a cultural theorist, art critic and independent curator. She has written and lectured
extensively on contemporary Indian art, especially new-media art and its political and cultural
contexts, at international venues such as Documenta 11, Kassel; the Zentrum fur Kunst und Medien,
Karlsruhe; the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein and the Transmediale, Berlin; the Danish Contemporary
Art Foundation, Copenhagen; and Lottringer 13, Munich, among others.

Adajania is a contributor to Springerin, Vienna, and Metamute, London, Public Art, Minneapolis, Art
21, Paris, Art Asia Pacific, New York, and X-Tra, Los Angeles. She was Editor-in-Chief of Art India, in
which capacity she developed a discursive space for emergent new-media and public art practices on
a global level. Adajania was co-curator for the exhibition ‘Zoom! Art in Contemporary India’ (Lisbon,
April 2004) and curator for the exhibition ‘Avatars of the Object: Sculptural Projections’ (Bombay,
August 2006).

36
‘Under Sail’ (1959)

Sabavala spent the 1950s in transit between decisions: between countries, styles and
orientations to the world. As a wanderer, he was attracted to ships and birds, motifs that
assumed a particular importance to his art during this period. The ship is an invitation to
paradox: you remain stationary while being in motion on it, and so it presents itself as the
most fitting rendition of Sabavala’s underlying theme of a passage between a ‘here’ and an
‘elsewhere’ that shift definition all the time. The bird, by negotiating between the enclosure
of gravity and the openness of flight, negotiates a dialectic of freedom for itself. These
impulses of passage and freedom are best portrayed in the 1959 seascape, ‘Under Sail I’,
which presents the viewer with the billowing profile of a boat that slices into the sea and
the wind like a wedge: it splits apart the foam and the reflections in water, tears through
water and cloud in a joyous invocation of speed.

Paper size : 30" x 22"

Composition size : 23" x 18"
Paper : Somerset 250 gsm
Edition size : 125

38 39
‘Mirror Image’ (1997)

‘Mirror Image’ (1997) stands in a lineage of self-portraits that Sabavala has executed since
the late 1940s, when he painted several romantic self-portraits of himself, including one in
which he appears as Mephistopheles in a cathedral. In these candid self-reflections – which
part the carefully maintained curtain of reserve that Sabavala customarily places between
his personality and his painting – the painter emerges as a narcissist curious about himself,
about the untapped currents coursing beneath the outward surface formed by eye and
cheek-bone, the supple weave of muscle and ligament. These are rare moments of
confessionalism, though: Sabavala is a deeply private person. He enjoys the pleasures of
conversation and company, but is not addicted to them; he can withdraw, gracefully, into
the sanctum of his solitude. An introvert, he has trained himself to be, in Jules Laforgue’s
phrase, “inflexibly polite to man, woman and destiny”. This basic unwillingness to expose
himself to the gaze of others beyond the call of politeness, coupled with an equally genuine
warmth towards his interlocutors, explains why Sabavala abandoned his early hopes for a
career on the stage. Not that his attraction to theatre simply vanished: it took other forms,
entering his paintings and surviving even into his most recent works, executed in the
1990s. Whether it is in the choice of costume and the stance of the figure, or in the drape
and fall of cloth and water, or in the ceremonies of recognition and revelation that his
protagonists conduct, Sabavala’s love of theatre recurs, resurgent. And the self-portrait is,
after all, at once the most private and the most public form of self-dramatisation.

Paper size : 22" x 30"

Composition size : 18" x 24"
Paper : Somerset 250 gsm
Edition size : 125

40 41
‘In the World’s Afterlight’ (1966)

Painted in 1966, ‘In the World’s Afterlight’ is one of the key works in Sabavala’s oeuvre. It
brings us a panoramic view of multiple horizons that rise to accompany the sun as it
vanishes in a great, golden twilight. The pilgrim figures gathered near a lake, perhaps to
pray at dusk, are the precursors of other such questing figures, whose advent would soon
impart a distinctive mystical cast to Sabavala’s paintings. His paintings of the late 1960s
and early 1970s incarnate the passage from the material to the essential as an upward
movement striving from earth to heaven; it mirrors his retreat, in life, from the world of
public situations, relationships, alliances and enmities. Withdrawing to that sanctum where
one may hear one’s inner voice – and where, soon, even that voice hushes itself and one
hears only the wind rustling through the trees, the rain spraying the window panes –
Sabavala immerses himself in the contemplation of spires, trees, flames.

Paper size : 30" x 44"

Composition size : 24" x 33"
Paper : Somerset 300 gsm
Edition size : 125

42 43
‘The Flight III’ (1979)

The contours of mountains and the flight patterns of birds have fascinated Sabavala ever
since he was a child, growing up in western India and Alpine Europe. In ‘The Flight III’, he
brings these visual preoccupations together, orchestrating a magnificent theatre of
verticals and horizontals. The verticals, fleshed out in green, ochre, slate, Naples yellow
and sienna, are shafts of colour: torrents flowing down a rock-face, or the multiple spines
of a canyon rising to heaven like a wind-hewn cathedral. And against them, the painter
releases his horizontal energies: a flock of migrant birds, winging its way from winter’s ice
and darkness to the countries of summer. ‘The Flight III’ is imbued with the sudden,
inexplicable, miraculous quality of an epiphany: it draws us into the silent, millennial
processes of nature, into migration and the turning of the seasons, the transmission of
instinct down the generations and the irrelevance, from a stratospheric perspective, of the
temporary borders drawn by humans.

Paper size : 44" x 30"

Composition size : 32" x 24"
Paper : Somerset 300 gsm
Edition size : 125

44 45
‘The Casuarina Line II’ (2002)

Sabavala loosens up his painterly grid in his works of the early 21st century, such as
‘Sunburst’, ‘Smouldering Sunset’, and ‘Lunar Magic’ (2001-2002). In these, he revels in
the pyrotechnics of the rising and setting sun, in the relaxed vocabulary of stippling and
striation, construing an imagery of stars, sails and nested figures into hymns to various
times of day and night, marking aubade and nocturne. The cycle of day and night exercises
him in the 2002 sequence titled ‘Casuarina Line I-III’, in which he invokes the same
landscape of a rocky beach at night, at sunset, and by moonlight.

This cluster of works refers back to themes that Sabavala has addressed before, but in
each case, the treatment is strikingly novel. Most unusually for him, Sabavala reveals the
machinery of his composition, makes it the real subject of these works: the painting is
demonstrated as the result of heaped bands or stacked panels, formats drawn from
tradition; or else, the artist borrows the architect’s device of the exploded view, and the
photographic techniques of the close-up and the aerial view, to re-define, not only his
subjects, but also his form.

Paper size : 22" x 30"

Composition size : 14" x 24"
Paper : Somerset 250 gsm
Edition size : 125

46 47
‘The Pavilion’ (2000)

‘The Pavilion’ is an essay in enchantment. Sabavala invites us to follow the faceted play of
crystalline planes rendered as mauve, blue-grey and yellow shards, from which emerges a
pellucid lake held among mountains like a jewel in a giant hand. At the heart of the lake,
materialising as if from mist, is an island; and on the island stands a Chinese pavilion.
Exquisite in its isolation, the pavilion appears to symbolise the grail waiting at the end of a
quest, or a place of rest for a turbulent pilgrim soul. And indeed, three such pilgrims wait
at the lake’s edge, looking across but without visible means of crossing. Sabavala’s
signature sails do not appear in this painting, and it is clear that the pilgrims will have to
brave hidden currents and secret spells to reach the island. ‘The Pavilion’ could also be
read as an autobiographical painting, invoking the solitude that the artist loses to the
demands of sociality.

Paper size : 30" x 44"

Composition size : 23" x 38"
Paper : Somerset 300 gsm
Edition size : 125

48 49
‘The Radiant Cloud’ (1975)

The seizure of beauty and terror, the blood-quickening trance of ecstasy is best embodied
in Sabavala’s clouds: illumined, shadowed, dragon-winged, do they signify hope or fear to
the wanderers who gaze up at them? The image of the predatory clouds begins in such
works as ‘Tenebrous Cloud’ (1967), an aerial conflagration of greys and browns flecked
with white accents, and ‘The Hooded Day’ (1970), in which a bird-shaped cloud swoops at
the waxy moon quivering in a grey and violet sky. The predatory cloud, gripping moon or
sun in its sulphurous claws, achieves a dramatic climax in ‘Radiant Cloud’ (1975), where it
is transmuted into the sign of a covenant with the Divine. Like a serene and terrible angel,
that golden cloud envelops the vaulted sky, redeems the exile-pilgrims with its blessing.

Paper size : 22" x 30"

Composition size : 17" x 24"
Paper : Somerset 250 gsm
Edition size : 125

50 51
‘The River II’ (2000)

The river has always served Sabavala both as a visual excitement and as an image of the
passage of time, the self and the world growing older, pursuing a strict course yet
performing variations on destiny. In ‘The River II’ (2000), the artist enthrals us with his
pursuit of the swift-changing rhythms of water, the progress of the river’s current as it
surges against the rock massifs along its course, now purling and eddying, now meandering
and postponing the moment when it must come to the cataract, cascade over the cliff. In
Sabavala’s account, the river is an animal of powerful moods; Sabavala’s handling is not
Cubist in the works of this period, so much as it is suggestive of the mediaeval German
Zackenstil, a dialogue between angularity and the arabesque. The river is treated as a form
of electricity, darting and trilling, working riffs of its own startling melody; or purling
between mountains; or singing past the melancholy hooded figures of trees and veined
rocks that strain to life.

Paper size : 44" x 30"

Composition size : 36" x 24"
Paper : Somerset 300 gsm
Edition size : 125

52 53
‘The Predator’ (1987)

The predatory clouds that had dominated Sabavala’s paintings during the 1970s sharpened
themselves into whirring birds of prey by the late 1980s: portraits based on eagles and
vultures, hawks and kestrels seen in the Western Ghats and in Arizona. The finest of these
ruthless conquerors of the air, arguably, is ‘The Predator’ (1987), a masterwork in which
the artist orchestrates the planarity of a compelling foreground with the deep recession of
the background. The great bird, seen in close-up, firmly occupies our attention, carved and
presented like a sculpture in motion, while we can glimpse serene distances through the
maelstrom of its wings, which furl with the energy of Hokusai waves. The predator holds a
fish in its beak, death shown as an essential element of the natural cycle of arrival and
departure, and the bird is not so much a brute force as a majestic and ancient actor in a
primeval theatre scripted by the instincts.

Paper size : 22" x 30"

Composition size : 17" x 24"
Paper : Somerset 250 gsm
Edition size : 125

54 55
‘Caverns Measureless to Man I’ (2004)

Sabavala has always been moved by poetry, and often drew the titles of his paintings from
the masters of phrase and cadence, especially during the 1960s and 1970s. In this recent
work, ‘Caverns Measureless to Man I’, Sabavala invokes the primal springs of insight and
illumination, paradoxically but not surprisingly held in the softness of the earth, in spaces of
darkness and water. The title is a gift from Coleridge, in whose fragment, ‘Kubla Khan’, the
sacred river Alph is said to run through “caverns measureless to man” until it empties itself
in a “sunless sea”. Sabavala brings his robed pilgrim figure to the very threshold of the
Coleridgean caverns of spiritual transformation in this painting.

Paper size : 30" x 44"

Composition size : 24" x 33"
Paper : Somerset 300 gsm
Edition size : 125

56 57
‘Bird Forms III’ (1985)

A sinister yet alluring aura plays around the siren shapes that float in a gorge or dry canyon
in Sabavala’s ‘Bird Forms’ series of the mid-1980s. The combination of noiseless, almost
inanimate and alien forms with the sparse vegetation and uninviting rockiness of the terrain
makes for an ominous composition. Curiously, a painting like ‘Bird Forms III’ (1985)
addresses the sense of hearing as much as it does the sense of sight. It proposes a hint of
music held in reserve, as though a score had been rehearsed but not released in this silent
performance, requiring only the attentiveness of a viewer to bring it to light and audibility.

Paper size : 44" x 30"

Composition size : 36" x 22"
Paper : Somerset 300 gsm
Edition size : 125

58 59
‘The Casuarina Line III’ (2002)

In ‘The Casuarina Line’ series (2002), Sabavala absorbs the topographical features of a
landscape in a broken grid of sight lines and link lines, releasing the energies of the moon
or the sun into an interplay of the celestial object and its reflection in water, or producing a
system of linear echoes that unites the stand of trees with the expanse of sky and water
that surrounds it. The variety of surfaces fascinates the artist in these works, as he
explores ways by which he can organise the limpidity of water, the porosity of sand, the
thickness of leaves and the effulgence of light into a harmonious, coalescent polyphony.

Paper size : 22" x 30"

Composition size : 14" x 24"
Paper : Somerset 250 gsm
Edition size : 125

60 61
‘The Woods, Palni Hills II’ (1994)

Sabavala crafts magical effects of light, movement and allusion in ‘The Woods, Palni Hills
II’ (1994), which is set in southern India’s Nilgiri Hills. The rhythm of the slender boles of
the trees echoes the dance of spears and horses’ hooves in Uccello’s famous war piece,
‘The Battle of San Romano’. The viewerly imagination may be excited but also disturbed to
find this resonance of the choreography of combat in a painting ostensibly cast as a
meditation on natural beauty, on the redemptive solace of the forest. On closer viewing,
though, we realise that ‘The Woods, Palni Hills I’ is also a study in counterpoint. The
plantation seems divided in its loyalties between sunlight and mist. The crispness of the
boles is held in check by the soft handling of foliage. The splash and draggle of light
passing through mist is registered in lively yellow dabs on pebbled green bark. An
Impressionist freshness animates the compositional rigour of the painting.

Paper size : 30" x 44"

Composition size : 24" x 36"
Paper : Somerset 300 gsm
Edition size : 125

62 63
 Jehangir Sabavala
(b. 1922), Bombay, India.

Sabavala studied at the Elphinstone College and moved to the J J School of Art, Bombay, in 1942. He left for London in 1945
to train at the Healtherley School of Art. In 1947 he moved to Paris to study at the Academie Julian and the Academie André
Lhote where he remained till 1951. He returned to the Academic Julian, Paris in 1952-54, and to the Academie de la Grande
Chaumiere in 1957

Since 1951, he has held 34 major solo exhibitions across the subcontinent, and in Europe. By now, he is a veteran contributor
to over 150 group exhibitions the world over, and is a regular contributor to Christie's and Sotheby's auctions in London and
New York, and to Osian 's and Saffronart.com in India.

His work is in several important collections, both private and public, in India and abroad, eg: the National Gallery of Modern
Art, New Delhi, the Birla Academy of Fine Arts, Calcutta, Parliament House, New Delhi, The Punjab Government Museum,
Chandigarh, Air - India, Bombay, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bombay, The National Gallery of South Australia,
Adelaide, to mention a few at random.

There have been five publications on his work starting with "Sabavala", Sadanga series, Vakils, Bombay 1966".

"The Reasoning Vision : Jehangir Sabavala's Painterly Universe", Tata Mc-Graw Hill Publishing Co. Ltd, New Delhi, 1980.
"Jehangir Sabavala", Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, 1984. " Sabavala-Pilgrim, Exile, Sorceror" Eminence Designs Pvt Ltd,
Bombay, 1998. And " The Crucible of Painting- The Art of Jehangir Sabavala" Eminence Designs Pvt Ltd, Bombay 2005.

A National Award winning film "Colours of Absence" was made on his life and work by documentary film maker Arun Khopkar
in 1993.

He is the recipient of a "Padma Shri" in 1977, a "Citation" for his contribution to the field of Modern Art from the National
Gallery of Modern Art, Bombay, in 2000, and the "Kala Ratna" award from the All India Fine Arts and Crafts Society, New
Delhi, in 2001. The Dadabhai Naoroji Millennium Awards, Mumbai, in 2002, K.R. Cama Oriental Institute, 172nd
Anniversary Lecture "Through the Biographer's Prism : Jehangir Sabavala, His Life and Art", in 2002. The 43rd Maharashtra
State Exhibition Award for Eminence and Distinction in Painting, in 2003. The Lalit Kala Ratna Award, New Delhi, in 2004.

To quote Jehangir Sabavala: "It has been a long and arduous journey, but one that has steadily evolved, without harsh leaps
or suicidal reverses. My graph is easily deciphered from the start to where it stands today.I am essentially a figurative
painter with a strong predilection towards landscape. It is central to my work, and yet, the figure whether wraithlike or
human, is often present as a part of the whole"

His career has been described as a steady progression, a journey-"with the paintings as steps, in a difficult, highly formalized
pilgrimage towards a metaphysical truth".

Courtesy : 'The Week', Malayalam Manorama

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 as his by putting his signature on the print, thereby accepting it as a work either executed by him or under
his supervision and thus regarding it as a ‘Fine Art Print’.

Limited Edition Serigraph However, an exception to note in this regard would be the recent instances of ‘Offset’ prints and ‘Digital
Reproductions’ being signed by artists and released either as a ‘Limited Edition’ or as an ‘Open Edition’. In
spite of these ‘Offset’ prints and ‘Digital Reproductions’ bearing the signature of the artist and/or being
released in a ‘Limited Edition’, they do not qualify as ‘Fine Art Prints’ and are segmented as ‘Photo-
Mechanical Reproductions’ in art markets across the globe. These types of ‘Offset’ prints and ‘Digitally
What is a Limited Edition Serigraph? Reproduced’ prints are treated as mere ‘Art Posters’ having no value as collectible works of art.

A Limited Edition Serigraph is a Limited Edition Fine Art Print.

What are the different types of Fine Art Prints?
A Serigraph is a Fine Art Print which has been produced using the screen printing method thus more
precisely making it a Fine Art Screen Print. There are various types of Fine Art Prints and they are differentiated by the process or technique by which
they have been printed.
The word ‘Serigraph’ literally means to draw through silk, In Latin ‘seri’ means silk and in Greek ‘graphos’
means to draw. The different types of Fine Art Prints that would qualify as an artist’s print and the print regarded and
accepted internationally as Fine Art Prints or Multiple Original works of art are Serigraphs, Lithographs,
The name ‘Serigraph’ was coined by Carl Zigrosser, an eminent curator of prints of the Philadelphia
Linocuts, Woodcuts, and various types of Intaglio prints such as Etchings, Engravings, Drypoints, Aquatints
Museum of Fine Arts, to distinguish Fine Art Screen Prints from other commercial and industrial Screen
and Mezzotints.
Prints.

What is a Fine Art Print? What is a Limited Edition Fine Art Print?
As explained above a ‘Fine Art Print’ is not a commercially reproduced poster printed on a high-speed web
Print making is one of the oldest forms of pictorial communication and of artistic expression, dating back to
press from photo-mechanically produced metal plates. ‘Fine Art Prints’ are regarded as ‘Multiple Original’
the 14th century in Europe and even earlier in China. Yet, despite the fact that most people know what a
works of art. When these ‘Fine Art Prints’ are printed in a limited quantity or restricted in the printing run to
“print” is, it has become difficult to tell the difference between a ‘Fine Art Print’ and an ‘Art Poster’ which is
a specified number they are said to be printed in a ‘Limited Edition’. This limiting of the number of prints is
a pure ‘Photo-mechanical Reproduction’.
conceived as such by the artist to make the print rare and add value to it.
This confusion has intensified over the past twenty years as artists have expanded the definition of a ‘Fine
“Proofs” of the work are pulled until they meet the artist’s approval. The number of prints for the edition is
Art Print’ to include a variety of new and innovative print making techniques.
then pulled, print by print, where upon they are signed and numbered by the artist. For example 4/50 means
One of the primary characteristics of print making is that many nearly identical images can be made by it is fourth impression from the total of fifty impressions. ( Although this does not necessarily represent the
inking and printing the same block, plate, stone, or screen, again and again. This makes it possible for many actual order of printings ). The artist keeps some ‘Artist’s Proofs’ for himself, usually marked "A.P." or "A/P".
people to see and/or own an image.
Generally after the number of prints in a ‘Limited Edition’ are pulled, the plates, stencils, blocks etc. are
Besides, what needs to be eradicated is the general notion that anything produced by the artist even in a meant to be destroyed or defaced making it impossible to reprint or restrike the same image again, thereby
partial indirect manner such as using the help of assistants or availing printing facilities outside of the genuinely rendering it as a ‘Limited Edition’ .
artists’ studio does not deserve to be seen as a work of art. The human mind can certainly put to use
currently available technology to create works of art of a high caliber, but the artist has to ensure that the
Lavesh Jagasia
painterly approach and feel is not diluted in the process. What also matters, is the concept along with the
manner of execution of the print. The concept would always be original and reflect an individual signature
style in the case of each artist.

There is no reason why an artist should be denied the facility of a practitioner in an allied creative field such
as printing to assist him. What matters is the “authorization” of the print, this being the sum total of all the
above i.e concept, technique, process and approach. These would be deemed to be accepted by the artist

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