Lot 51: Untitled (Mother and Child)

SAILOZ MOOKHERJEA (1907-1960) Untitled (Mother and Child) signed 'Sailoz Mookherjea' (upper left) oil on canvas 28¼ x 23¾ in. (71.8 x 60.3 cm.) Painted circa 1950s

71.8 x 60.3 cm.

circa 1950

Osian's, Mumbai, 20 October 2001, lot 48

As a teacher at the Delhi Polytechnic and Art Director of the Imperial Tobacco Company in Calcutta, Sailoz Mookherjea "shaped the thinking of a whole generation of artists from Ram Kumar to J. Swaminathan [...] Attempting to retrieve the rural visual, Mukherjea sought to reinterpret a subject matter sentimentalised in the past, by bringing back the lost rural into current urban imagination." (20th Century Indian Modern Art: India Art Fair, New Delhi, 2014, p. 151) Through the juxtaposition of deep brown tones with bursts of red, yellow, and green representing an exuberant Indian sky, Mookherjea captures the vibrancy of the Indian bucolic. Born in 1907, Mookherjea graduated from the Government College of Arts and Crafts in Calcutta in 1932. The young artist moved to Paris in 1937, where he was drawn to the colourscapes of the Ècole de Paris. Though deeply impressed by the School, he remained committed to the representation of Indian subject matter. His capacity to navigate the East and West, deriving stylistic and intellectual frameworks from both, has distinguished him as one of the vanguard of the Indian Modernists, and he has been recognised by the Government of India as one of the country's nine 'National Treasure' artists.