On
7th January 2020, the Governor of Maharashtra, Bhagat Singh Koshyari
presented the first ‘Vasudeo Gaitonde Kala Jeevan Puraskar’ (Life Time
Achievement Award in the Field of Art) to Late Akbar Padamsee (posthumously) at
the 60th Maharashtra State Art Exhibition held at Jehangir Art
Gallery. An evening earlier, Akbar Padamsee passed away at the Isha Yoga Center
in Coimbatore. He was excited when he heard of receiving the award that was
dedicated to him in the name of his artist friend Vasudeo Gaitonde who was his
senior by few years at Sir
J. J. School of Art.
Born
on April 12, 1928, Padamsee’s ancestors hailed from VÄghnagar, a village in the
Bhavnagar district of the erstwhile Kathiawar, now part of Gujarat. His
grandfather was the sarpanch of the village
and earned the title Padmashree or Padamsee after distributing his entire
granary to the village during a famine. The family had belonged to Charana community, known as Deviputras (sons of the goddess). Charanas were essentially litterateurs
and folklorist. Youngest amongst eight siblings, Akbar, as a child, stayed
aloof and preferred to amuse himself with books. He also displayed an ardent
interest in art that developed through photographs of gods and goddesses his
nanny shared with him. The antique Irani furniture and flower vases that
adorned his home also inspired him. At the age of four, he took to drawing in
the margins of the account books and ledgers at his father’s shop of imported
glass lanterns on Chakla Street, South Mumbai. In his primary school, he would draw
caricatures on the black board before the class teacher would arrive, when the
teacher would enquire, the classmates would point out to Padamsee, but she
would never believe that such a young boy’s drawings had a mature finesse.
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| Akbar Padamsee |
He was 11 years old when he accidentally stepped on
a rusted nail, leading to a serious injury. While the wound was cured, the
psychological impact left him speechless. It was more the will to speak that
had gone away. Apparently, he did not speak a word for about nine years.
Instead, he focused his energies on reading and art. After his father passed
away, his elder brother Nicky (Nurudin), eight years his
senior served as a father figure and gave him a book on Freud’s Introductory
Lectures on psychoanalysis, dream interpretations and the psychopathology of
everyday life. Not quite realizing what it was about, it was like tasting in
advance what was going to come. Padamsee reciprocated with the writings of
philosophers like Heidegger, Sartre and the likes; he believed that thinking
was a system before one could paint. The influence of this can be seen in his
later works. He chose to study at Sir J.J. School of Art, but Nicky advised him
to join St. Xavier’s High School. At St. Xavier’s High School, Fort, he had a
very strange school life. He was a back-bencher and day-dreamer who was always
ridiculed by his classmates over his speech impediment. During school
examinations, his elder brother helped him study, and somehow saved him from
the kind of education that was doled out in those schools. Later, he met his
first mentor, drawing teacher Shirsat, a water colourist, who tutored him
in the medium, wines in Khandala, and nudes at a special class at Charni Road,
in preparation for his studies at the Sir J. J. School of Art, enabling him to
join the course directly in its third year.
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| Poster done by M.F. Husain for Padamsee's Metascape show at Pundole,1975 |
Padamsee’s
years at the art school came at a time when a lot of undercurrents were passing
through the Indian Art world, the most important being the formation of the Progressive
Artist Group. He learned the academic style of painting that was popular in
those times but did not restrict himself to just that. Even as a young adult, he
enthusiastically learnt what was beyond the norm. He would skip classes and
spend hours in the college library, pouring over books and acquainting himself
with the work of the Masters. He was more interested in the science of art
inspired by formal conundrums and conceptual schemes in approaching his work
and would often investigate Durer’s drawings, Piero della Francesca’s studies
for the curve of a queen’s neck – he had made a complex grid as if it were for
a bridge. One day, he found T.A. Gopinath Rao’s Elements of Hindu Iconography
in the library and was amazed by the precise directions that were given to the
bronze sculptors. It was later at the school of art that he used the concept of
the grid as geometry of proportion; however, it was at the elementary level. He
also read a book on principles of Chinese painting. However, it was only later that
he developed these ideas further .Of his early days spent at Sir J. J. School
of Art, he once claimed: “In those days, learning painting in that tree-studded
campus was a heady experience”. Professor Shankar Palshikar introduced him to
miniature paintings and burnishing the surface with cowrie shell to spread the
color evenly to get a glaze effect, but Padamsee would be lazy to do it all by
himself. His early work during that year started with detailed study of heads,
prophets and different couples. Padamsee’s subjects appeared astute with a
pondering gaze. He disliked the sentimental and refused to submerge his figures
with that feeling. This is why; even when he portrays his nude protagonists, they
lack any outward sensuality. Padamsee
studied French and his art teacher, Shankar Palsikar, encouraged him to study
Sanskrit, which later became the basis of Padamsee’s thought process and the
foundational structure for his art.
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| Head, 11x9 in. pencil on paper, 2000 |
After
his completing his diploma in painting, he took up sculpture for a year; one
afternoon, when he was rhythmically beating the sheet metal with a hammer to
make a relief sculpture. In the adjacent studio, another professor called Sabannavar,
from the metal-craft department, was busy with his work. Suddenly, he barged
into Padamsee’s space and asked him to stop work. The cause of the professor’s
anger was the sound that the artist was producing while beating the sheet. He
knew from the sound that Padamsee was doing something wrong. He asked Padamsee
if he was disturbed, to which Padamsee replied with a yes. Padamsee was thus
sensitized to the importance of sound in art-making. Later, he would apply this
lesson an accidental insight to his pictorial practice. In an interview with
Homi Bhabha, he recalls: “The professor’s interpretation intrigued me and I
decided to experiment with sound. I took a very heavy aluminum holder in which
I inserted a felt pen. I then dipped it in ink and started hitting on my
drawing paper stretched on the board, really hard. Next, I tried this on my
charcoal and oil works on canvas board and had a whole show around these works.
I was going by the sound. Finally, an image would emerge, and it was often said
that I painted with dots, but in reality I was painting with sound.”
Padamsee was a student associate, not a formal member, of the
Progressive Artist Group, founded by F.N. Souza, with Raza and M.F. Husain as
members, among others, with whom he developed a lifelong friendship. He along
with Tyeb Mehta helped in installing works of the Progessives and other seniors
like Mohan Samant. His father had a cyclostyle machine, with which he made
copies of a catalogue of the show the Progressives had put up. That probably
made him a blue-eyed boy. Later in 1948, an exhibition of paintings of student
artists comprising of fifty artworks was organized by the Progressive Artist
Group and was shown at the Bombay Art Society’s Salon. Francis Newton Souza,
the then Secretary of the Progressive Artist Group said the exhibition was a
novel idea and intended to draw attention of the public and art critics to the works of art students. Padamsee’s
paintings were highly appreciated by the art critics.
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| Nude, 11x14.5 in. pencil on paper, 2007 |
In 1950,
a former student visited the school of art and showed interest in the works of
the students. The senior was S.H. Raza. Padamsee told Raza that he was given
third-class. Raza said he should have gotten a first-class with this work. Raza
had received a scholarship to go to Paris and offered to take him along.
Padamsee shared the news with Palshikar, who said he should see India first;
next Padamsee brought himself a ticket to Madurai and visited the Meenakshi
temple. Later in 1951 along with Raza he sailed to France, where Padamsee met
the surrealist Stanley Hayter and started
painting at a local studio, Atelier 17, and held his first show at Galerie
Saint Placide in 1952. His first exhibition in Paris, which required
artists to stay anonymous, saw Padamsee sharing the prize awarded for it by the
French Journal d’Arte with the surrealist Carzou, then in his 40s. Thus began a
never ending journey of honours and awards. He was featured in the 1959 Tokyo
Biennale, he received a gold medal from the Lalit Kala Akademi in 1962 A
fellowship by the Rockefeller Foundation in New York followed in 1965, and in
1969 the prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru Fellowship, he was bestowed by Padma
Bhushan and Kailash Lalit Kala award in 2010. His figurative works from the
1950s gave way to bronze heads the human expression was a lifelong
preoccupation of Padamsee to photography. Exhibitions have been held at
institutions worldwide, including the Rubin Museum of Art in New York and
London’s Royal Academy of Art.
Padamsee
always approached his art with deep thought and intense focus, constantly
pushing boundaries and innovating in his creative process. During
his illustrious career, Padamsee explored a wide range of mediums, and managed
to remain fiercely experimental and individualistic. His artistic oeuvre is a
formal exploration of a few chosen genres — prophets, heads, couples, still-life,
grey works, metascapes, mirror-images and tertiaries, across a multitude of
media oil painting, plastic emulsion, water colour, sculpture, printmaking,
computer graphics, films and photography. His early portraits and landscapes in
varied mediums of painting, drawing and etching demonstrate a quasi-spiritual
style of working. His oils have been characterised by a deep intensity and
luminescence while his drawings exude a serene grace.
Akbar
Padamsee has always been eclectic, drawing his inspiration from various
sources. He spoke at length about the western and eastern philosophy, be it
Paul Klee’s The Thinking Eye or Mammata’s Kavyaprakasha.
He was on board with anything that helped him give an adequate structure to his
own art. Never one up for an easy summing up of art, his work continues to take
the viewers through an intense journey unmasking the mysteries of art, through
his work and life.
Quoting
Padamsee’s favourite line from the Isa Upanishad, there’s formlessness
about great poetry that moves you. Addressing the sun, the speaker says,
‘Remove the glare, so that I can look at you face-to-face because I’m the very
person that’s yonder; I’m the sun myself. When the heat of the sun reaches me,
let the body be reduced to ashes; but may the mind remember, remember,
remember… Om shanti, shanti, shanti…’
Abhijeet Gondkar
February
2020, Mumbai
(Abhijeet
Gondkar is an independent writer and curator based in Mumbai. The above
extracts are from inputs by Bhanumati Padamsee, Jehangir Nicholson Art
Foundation and further readings of Padamsee’s conversation with Homi Bhabha
published by Marg. The above article was published as a tribute to Akbar
Padamsee in ‘Roopa-Bheda’ 2019-20, an annual publication of Sir J.J. School of
Art, Mumbai)