Painting, red and yellow with bird, by Jagdish Swaminathan, oil on canvas, India, 1972

The painting, in oil colour on canvas, depicts a semi-abstract landscape with yellow background, a central panel of red, and graduating tones from yellow through to green rhombus shapes. At the top right hand side of the painting sits a small blue bird.

A semi-abstract landscape with yellow background, a central panel of red, and graduating tones from yellow through to green rhombus shapes. At the top right hand side of the painting sits a small blue bird.

Purchased from the October Gallery. Rp 86/929

Jadsigh Swaminathan was born into a wealthy middle class family in Simla in 1928. Persuaded by his family to enrol at the New Delhi University faculty of medicine, Swaminathan developed a keen interest in politics and art. Having failed his 1943 pre-medical exams, the artist left for Calcutta where he became involved with the Revolutionary Socialist Party. His in-depth knowledge of Marxist literature turned him into one of the strongest members of the party. A year later, Swaminathan returned to New Delhi where he joined the Congress Socialist Party (CSP).

During the sixties, the artist became a freelance writer for several magazines, expressing his views on politics as well as art. Unlike his senior contemporaries such as Husain, Souza and Gaitonde who developed a modernist pictorial language, Swaminathan embraced an artistic style more rooted in Indian tradition.

In his quest to create a new pictorial vocabulary, the artist challenged Western ideas of progress and their reliance on anthropocentric interpretations of the universe. His flat, colourful and childlike landscapes, all devoid of human presence, reflect his innocent visions and desire to return to nature.

Swaminathan often chooses iridescent hues, including bright pinks, mauves, pale greens and lemon yellows, and applies them to the canvas in a flat manner. In this way, his landscapes appear highly geometric and stylized: zigzag patterns represent mountains, free-floating circles the sun, rectangular trunks a tree hung against the sky. In addition, many of the symbols used by Swaminathan are borrowed from Indian folk and tribal cultures, especially those that have mythological and religious connotations such as the OM, the swastika, the lotus, the lingam and the snake. When looking at his work, we are reminded of the rarefied atmosphere of miniature paintings and Pahari ornaments.

In 1968 Swaminathan won an honour mention in the first Indian Triennale. The following year, he participated in the Sao Paulo Biennale and was awarded the Nehru Fellowship. In 1981, the Government of Madhya Pradesh invited him to set up the art museum Roopanker at Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal. He served as the Director of Roopankar, until 1990. He died in 1994.

In this painting we observe a semi-abstract landscape with a bright yellow background. The central panel appears in red and is surrounded by graduating tones from yellow through to green rhomboid shapes, which represent mountains. At the top of the left hand corner sits a small blue bird, the one figurative element in this painting. The artist, who studied at the Delhi Polytechnic and later at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, developed a style that was influenced by abstract Western trends as well as traditional Indian Pahari painting techniques such as the use of blocks of bright flat colour.

IS.16-1986