This is an untitled painting by Jagdish Swaminathan, created using oil on canvas. It is now exhibited in the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi.
- Identifier
- ngma-13416
- Material
- Oil, Canvas
- Note
- An artist, writer, activist, ideologue and institution maker -- Jagdish Swaminathan (1928-1994) strode the worlds of art, ideas and politics in his tempestuous life. He argued for and helped create a kind of "indigenous modernism" in the field of Indian art in the Nehruvian era. He ran away from his colonial bureaucrat father's home at the age of 16 to join the Quit India movement and was a self-made man of great determination who was inspired equally by Mahatma Gandhi and Karl Marx. Along with Kamla Devi Chattaopadhyay and Pupul Jaykar, he was an ardent champion of folk and tribal artists and his influence on the Indian modern art scene from the 1960s is considered as seminal. An active painter who exhibited almost every year between 1960 and 1992, he also wrote on art widely and for a short period co-edited the journal Contra with Octavio Paz the eminent Mexican poet and essayist. Paz has also written a poem on Swaminathan._x000D_At the philosophical level, Swaminathan's entire life's endeavour was to militate against the notions of 'history and progress' that he believed colonialism and the West had imposed on us. Swaminathan was keenly intrigued by the notion of the 'Cyclicity of Time' in Indian aesthetics and often talked about 'completing the circle' as it were, in his own painting. At the end of his life he returned to the same kind of 'primitivist abstraction' inspired by tribal/ primitive rock painting that he first began in the early 1960s. He was also quite taken by the Upanishads and Tantra in some phases of his life and was perhaps the first to induct Tantirc symbolism in his works as early as the mid-1960s. . He believed that the practice of art-making should be a joyous re-creation of life and nature, as seen in the art of indigenous and tribal peoples. He emulated this in his own work and lifestyle._x000D_Swaminathan was a fulltime professional painter from 1960 onwards and his works can be found at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Lalit Kala Akademi, Jehangir Nichelson Collection, Chandigarh Museum, Himachal Pradesh Museum, Birla Academy of Arts, Bharat Bhawan, Ministry of External Affairs GOI, ITDC, AIR INDIA and many private and public art collections in India and abroad.
- Pages
- 115.5 X 80 cm
- Published in
- India
- Type
- Painting
