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“You do not only structure space, you... inhabit it.”
JEHANGIR SABAVALA
The Star that Beckons
is the first of three
canvases with the same title, which
Jehangir Sabavala painted over the course
of three decades.
The Star that Beckons II
and
III
were painted in 1999. The present
lot, the earliest exploration of the theme,
was painted in 1968, and is arguably the
finest, emerging from a time when the
young artist was looking for his own
voice. Through the 1960s, Sabavala made
a conscious attempt to transcend the
principles of Cubism which he had learnt at
the Academie André Lhote a decade earlier.
He was aware of “the dangers of an over‒
reliance on fragmentation... [and] began his
trek, his outward spiralling towards the vast
horizons lit by a cloudy incandescence that
have held his unwavering attention.” (Ranjit
Hoskote,
The Crucible of Painting: The Art
of Jehangir Sabavala,
Mumbai: Eminence
Designs Pvt. Ltd., 2005, p. 86)
The Star that
Beckons
is evocative of the artist’s own
journey, guided by his own intuition and
the desire for a personal identity.
The 1984 Lalit Kala monograph on the artist
describes the present lot in its fullness:
“With this painting of 1968, begins Jehangir’s
mature style that is to ride (through
variations) full curve into his present work...
The bonding is softer, more nuanced. Space
and light combine in sensuous curves of
wet sand and of sand‒coloured sea. Palette
is down to blond and grey. Space, light and
shadow step forward. The traveller turns his
back on us to the miles that lie ahead. As if
to announce incipient allegory, the pilgrim
theme surfaces. Denuded dreamscape
surfaces.” (Pria Devi,
Jehangir Sabavala
,
New Delhi: Lalit Kala Akademi, 1984, p. 6)
Image courtesy of Shirin Sabavala