Bal Chhabda

Acquired directly from the artist, 2006 

New York, TamarindArt, 50 Years of Bal Chhabda: Paintings in New York, May - June 2006

New York, DAG, India's Rockefeller Artists, 7 November 2017 - 3 March 2018

Mumbai, DAG, India's Rockefeller Artists, 29 November 2018 - 16 February 2019

Exhibition catalogue, 50 years of Bal Chhabda: Paintings in New York, TamarindArt, New York, 2006, illustration p. 7

K. Singh (ed.), India's Rockefeller Artists: An Indo-US Cultural Saga, DAG Modern, New Delhi, 2017, illustration p. 378

Lightning by M.F. Husain, TamarindArt, Asia Society Museum, New York and Mapin Publishing Pvt. Ltd., 2019, illustration p. 19

Bal Chhabda was a principal figure in the making of Indian modern art in the mid-20th century. Born into the film and distribution business in Ahmedabad, Chhabda pursued moviemaking ventures in Hollywood, before returning to the flourishing creative community in Bombay. Catalyzed by a chance encounter with Maqbool Fida Husain in the 50s, Chhabda became embedded in the city’s art scene. Husain introduced him to the creatives at the Bhulabhai Desai Memorial Institute such as Ravi Shankar and Ebrahim Alkazi and artists such as Tyeb Mehta, Sayed Haider Raza, Krishen Khanna, Ram Kumar and Vasudeo S. Gaitonde.

Chhabda was a generous collector of these artists' work - and the sculptures of Pilloo Pochkhanawala and Adi Davierwala - and an important social figure of the time. Recognizing the financial and commercial hardships Indian artists faced, Chhabda founded Gallery 59 in Bombay in 1959, creating vital space for artists to show their work, encouraging new collectors and spreading awareness.

Not only was he a patron of Indian art himself, but Chhabda also received important patronage for his own critical and artistic work. In 1972, he was awarded the Rockefeller Fund fellowship to travel to the United States to review contemporary art. During this time, he also furthered his unique visual language apparent in the triptych, In Search of Liberty, which depicts the anguish and conflict of WWII.

Entrenched in the arts community of Bombay, Chhabda’s artist friends had encouraged him to paint. Negotiating the boundaries between abstraction and figuration, his work employs swatches of natural tones and saturated pigments to convey a dreamlike composition of colors. His style is a cosmopolitan reimagining of Indian modern themes, deeply inspired by the creatives that he had befriended.

‘Chhabda’s handling of paint, which left intensely pigmented blocks of sometimes chalky color, is similar to Husain’s and Gaitonde’s in that era. But Chhabda never ties his subjects to rural life as did Husain nor committed himself completely to abstraction as did Gaitonde. Like Padamsee, Chhabda betrayed an interest in the erotics of painting, but unlike him, his subject matter was deliberately effaced… Chhabda’s most disciplined works very deliberately undermine the distinction between figure and ground, and invest in a sense of flatness and surface.’ (K. Zitzewitz, Bal Chhabda (1923-2013), Critical Collective, https://criticalcollective.in/ArtistInner2.aspx?Aid=302&Eid=307)

Head of Christ is a masterwork of Chhabda’s signature rainbow mirage, combining influences of his friends’ painting techniques while also infusing the composition with his own expression. Shapes resembling a human head emerge from a bright grey-brown background, seemingly rising from a congestion of teal, yellow, green and black in the lower half of the canvas. Without formal academic training, Chhabda's work represents an envisioning of Indian modern art not as a departure from European styles, but as a new artistic experiment in and of itself.

In 2006, Head of Christ was part of a major retrospective of the artist's work at TamarindArt in New York, 50 Years of Bal Chhabda: Paintings in New York. Situated amongst various paintings which capture the artist's versatile style, the present lot features as a cornerstone of this iconic show. Head of Christ's size, multicolor and ability to depict the immensity of the divine contribute to its status as not only an important work of the 1960s but across Chhabda's entire oeuvre.