Kanwal Krishna is one of the early pioneers of modernism in Indian art. Born in Kamalia, part of pre-partition Punjab, in 1910, Krishna studied at the Government College of Art and Craft in Calcutta from 1933 to 1939. During his time there, the artist took an interest in watercolor depictions of the landscape, often traveling to the nearby mountains to paint.

In 1938, for example, Krishna traveled to Lhasa in Southern Tibet with a monk and documented his time there in paint, becoming one of the first artists to illustrate life in the remote country. A couple of years later, in 1940, he was the first artist granted permission to depict and film the enthronement ceremony of the fourteenth Dalai Lama there. Later, Krishna and his wife Devyani, also a well-known artist, spent three years travelling across Northern Sikkim and Tibet, living an almost nomadic life as they expressed the barren but glorious scenes they encountered in their work.

In 1949, just after Indian independence, Krishna helped found the Delhi Silpi Chakra, an artists’ collective that provided a platform for modern art in New Delhi. In 1953, he joined the Modern School in New Delhi as a teacher and travelled to Europe, where he first began experimenting with printmaking. Krishna eventually gravitated towards abstraction, moving on from the realist landscapes he had been painting over the past decades.

Regardless of his chosen medium and genre, Krishna felt he was creating and communicating a spiritual connection with nature through his work, and with the mountains in particular. Lots 36 and 37 include a selection of Krishna’s early landscapes depicting scenes from his travels between 1940-45. These breathtaking mountainscapes, created with Krishna’s expressive mark making and subtle palette, were observed from villages and cities in the Chitral district of present-day Pakistan as well as Gangtok in India.