Untitled (Village Group, Saurashtra)

Born in Indore in 1910, Narayan Shridhar Bendre studied at the State Art School in the city prior to pursuing a Government Diploma in Art in Bombay. The most formative years of his career was the time he spent at Maharaja Sayajirao University in Baroda, first as the head of the painting department at the Faculty of Fine Arts in 1950 and then as the Dean of Faculty in 1959. As one of the founding members of the Baroda Group, Bendre was also instrumental in laying the foundations for a new program at the University. It was in Baroda that he veered away from the strictures of Academic Realism and instead championed the modernist idioms of Post-Impressionism, Expressionism and Cubism. He was also an avid traveller and he gained more exposure to Western Modernist art movements during his travels to the United States and Europe. Bendre left Baroda in 1966 and returned to Bombay where he would live for the rest of his life.

Bendre celebrated the pastoral in art, depicting India’s rural landscapes and quiet moments of village life. From the 1970s, he began experimenting with his own version of Pointillism, creating images with the use of pixel-like dots and small horizontal brushstrokes. He conveyed the effect of depth through a gradual elimination of detail and by avoiding shadow and perspective in his works to create receding planes between the foreground and the background. As he stated, "for me, the creative process begins with the blank canvas, by the dabbing of paint on it, the aim being to catch the original impact of the total image conceived. Things are nebulous in the beginning, become clearer by manipulating, by the application of more paint, dabbing, scratching, washing off, repainting, till I'm nearer to the original impact." (R. Chatterji, Bendre: The Painter and the Person, Singapore, 1990, p. 63)

In the present lot, Bendre has used bright blues, greens and pinks along with warm whites and yellows to depict an everyday village scene in Saurashtra, a hot and arid region in the state of Gujarat in India. The vibrantly attired locals seem to be deliberating about their daily chores. The figures are solidly placed in the foreground and the semi-abstract rural surroundings form the background of the painting. Whilst the subject matter and imagery of the painting is Indian, Bendre’s Neo Pointillism emphasizes rural serenity in its own unique way. “Bendre interprets depth and sentimentality with austerity; the past, the present, and the drama of the situation in the narrative all congeal into a moment.” (A. Das Gupta, ‘A House for Modernism,’ Art and Visual Culture in India, 1857-2007, Mumbai, 2009, p. 167)