Lot 181: NARAYAN SHRIDHAR BENDRE (1910 - 1992)

Signed in Devanagiri lower right

Oil on canvas

47 1/4 by 41 1/4 in. (120 by 105 cm.)

In 1941 Bendre won the Bombay Art Society Gold Medal for his watercolor titled Benaras landscape. In 1943 he was hailed by the Times of India critic as the leading artist of his generation and to his further credit his artistic vision became a driving force for the artists that were to follow in his wake. For a brief period he taught M. F. Husain and helped him gain admission to the J. J. School or Art in Bombay, encouraging other artists including Ara to continue with their vocation. Ironically as the modernist thrust of the artists that he had taught began to capture the imagination of the Indian art scene his own style began to be overlooked, but in retrospect he must be considered one of the most important Indian landscape artists of the twentieth century.

In the 1970's and 1980's Bendre experimented with his own version of pointillism, this work perfectly illustrates his use of this technique. Although the technique has been adopted from western artistic movements of the 1890's, the inspiration for his work was always drawn directly from the world around him.

'I belong to this earth. I walk on this earth, and I don't think of anything but this earth. Things here are my kind of library, I'm not interested in anything else. As such I don't create dream paintings. Whatever I have experienced in this world I paint. Other things are not important to me.' (Bendre, 1992.)

'With the inclusion of the hues and even the inclusion of the black color which are Expressionist traits, Bendre rather successfully attempted a sort of telescoping of the late nineteenth century French Impressionist style with the German Expressionist style of the second decade of the twentieth century...Langhammer brought into India, Kokoschka's style of panoramic landscapes. Similar hues of color were employed by Bendre to replace the mellow color scheme of the existing Indore school as if to usher in the celebration of the Indian sunshine.' (Parimoo, 1992.)