Sotheby’s sterling Indian master sale in March

Sotheby’s Modern and Contemporary South Asian Art auction, holds a promise of provenance and rare finding archival works in a sale on March 17th 2025 in NY. From abstract master Jagdish Swaminathan to Madhvi Parekh’s Flower Seller to F.N Souza’s Oriental City to Dhanraj Bhagat’s Siva Dance each work is a piece of art history in the making.

Jagdish Swaminathan

This sale has sterling works by Indian masters amongst which Jagdish Swaminathan’s  Homage to Solzhenitsyn, one of the largest-known murals from Jagdish Swaminathan’s Bird and Mountain series is a standalone wonder. At 13.5 feet wide, it’s a breathtaking triptych from 1973, filled with rolling hills, vibrant birds, and seed-like orbs, all set against a striking yellow sky. It was acquired shortly after its creation by an American diplomat and represents a stunning example of Swaminathan’s visionary cosmos. It was showcased in a single painting exhibition at Dhoomimal Gallery, New Delhi in May 1973 followed by an exhibition at The Art Society of the International Monetary Fund, Washington, D.C. in August – September 1975.

Souza’s landscape Oriental City

Sotheby’s says Souza’s Oriental City  is a masterpiece created for an American audience,  is an exceptional landscape  that marks the late 1950s peak of his artistic production. His control of the medium is revealed through his use of colour that suffuses the work with a bright light that resonates even in the darker areas. Oriental City evokes a stained- glass window with brilliant hues that glow as if lit from a hidden source.

Vibrant hues of red, blue, green and yellow stand in stark contrast to the thick, plentiful black lines that create a vertical landscape. Striking in its geometric amalgam of rectangles and triangles, Oriental 

City resembles a city fortress on high ground, complete with a domed church at the center, its cross reaching the peak of the composition. The blue-black background captures the mesmerizing opacity of night while the green-yellow foreground is replete with trees and branches, capturing the vitality of earth. Oriental City is a masterwork that captivates with its form and color, and carries the legacy of the artist in America and his tireless search for broader patronage.

Dhanraj Bhagat’s Siva

Minimalist moorings and simple contours define Dhanraj Bhagat’s Dancing Siva an epic work of cosmic compositional charisma.Each element of Shiva’s Tandava is laden with symbolism but Bhagat  created the suggested  raised right hand, ( without holding the damaru (drum), signifying the sound of creation.

The left hand, holding fire, symbolized destruction and transformation. The raised right foot represents the triumph of knowledge over ignorance. The dramatic poise depicts the union of cosmic elements.

NGMA Bangalore had an epic showing of Dhanraj Bhagat, the sculptor who was Head of the Department at College of Art Delhi for more than two decades and created a series of works that transcended both abstraction and realism in 2019. In a brilliantly designed installation curated exhibition by Adwaita Gadnayak and his team at NGMA Delhi, this show read like a lesson in art history.Bhagat’s Siva Dance was placed against black paper folded like coal and lit with lights from within by scenographer Ajeesh Raj.

The spiritual significance tells us that this  is not merely a dance but a profound expression of spiritual truths. It serves as a reminder of the transient nature of life and the eternal cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. It illustrates the belief that destruction is not an end but a prelude to new creation, embodying the continuous renewal of the universe.

Moving away from the British colonial legacy of academic naturalism, Bhagat was among a number of Indian artists, in particular, who turned to a combination of abstraction and figuration to articulate new ideas in conception and composition.

Madhvi Parekh’s Flower Seller 1975

The beauty of Indian indigenous accents and an amorphous aura both come together in Madhvi Parekh’s masterpiece that creates a central flying figure with a smaller number of floating companions all created in the transparent mould of rural rhythms in resonance.

At once a symbolism of what is modern as well as primordial, her composition questions the distinction between the two and speaks a visual language understandable to both the village and the cosmopolitan.

She creates an intensely  fabular world of the imagined village with roots in the traditions of Indian folk painting. The Flower Seller exemplifies her distinctive sensibility,  hovering between genres and styles, bridging both traditional and  avant-garde with  naivety as well as subconscious surrealism. In this elaborate work, the single black and coloured amorphous form in the foreground is placed against a rich, patterned translucent sky blue and white background of fine lines and dots and floating figures.

‘ The painting presents an ecstatic reverie of the natural world: Flora and fauna seem to have undergone wondrous transformations and protean creatures emerge from the net-like patterned background, adding an element of mystery and charm.’

MF Husain’s Musician 1967

MF Husain’s Untitled Musician is a pleasure to behold.He brings alive Wassily Kandinsky when he said: ‘ There is no “must” in art, because art is free.’Untitled (Musician) is a monochromatic sitar player set against a stroked textured scarlet background.

Sotheby’s states that the present lot belongs to a series of paintings dedicated to classical Indian music and dance that Husain painted from the late 1950s to the end of the 1960s. This project drew inspiration from Ragamala paintings, a classical miniature form that presented visual interpretations of Indian musical modes, with specific ragas expressed through colour, form and symbols that themselves relate to classical Indian music and poetry.

Ghulam Rasool Santosh

One of India’s greatest abstractionists, a great teacher,a thinker, a poet, a ShaIvite, who had an awakening and a meditative abstractionist. Gulam Rasool Santosh was born in the Kashmir valley in 1929. He was forced to give up painting after his father’s death and as a result took up several odd jobs of silk weaving, sign board painting, and white washing walls. Slowly he returned to painting and joined the Progressive Arts Association in Kashmir started by S.H. Raza, mobilizing Kashmiri painters. As a member of this group, Santosh showed his work all over India. He won the scholarship to study Fine Arts under N.S. Bendre at the MS University, Baroda in 1954. Santosh has held over 30 solo exhibitions. He received the Lalit Kala Akademi award in 1973 and the Padma Shri in 1977. Gulam Rasool Santosh died on 10th March 1997 in New Delhi.His works are a metaphor of the Purusha Prakriti principle in nature, the belief of oneness and deeper connections of the human spirit to the soul and transcendental meditation.The human form in mediation exemplified by botanics became a medley of geometry and symbolism of the highest order for Santosh. The petals, the symmetry and the surreal signature all come together to prove that abstraction is born of deeper meditative practices.Amongst Indian abstractionists he is yet to a place of higher accord as a veteran in the world of abstraction.

Images: Sotheby’s