Poetics of Color Natvar Bhavsar Sundaram Tagore Gallery Poetics of Color Natvar Bhavsar Acknowledgements Ajay Bhavsar Janet Bhavsar Rajeev Bhavsar Janice Bouley First published in the United States of America in 2006 Rebecca Costanzo by Sundaram Tagore Gallery 547 West 27th Street Devika Daulet-Singh New York, New York 10001 Rukminee Guha Thakurta Tel 212 677 4520 Fax 212 677 4521 Barbara Eagle Email [email protected] Faina Goldstein www.sundaramtagore.com Gina Im Text © Sundaram Tagore Gallery Aranka Israni Photographs © Natvar Bhavsar Susan McCaffrey All rights reserved under international copyright conventions. Carter Ratcliff No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted Naomi Rivas in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, George Schmidt including photocopy, recording, or any other information Emily Steiger storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Kelly Tagore Sundaram Tagore Design Rukminee Guha Thakurta/Photoink Gad Zehavi Printer Pragati Offset Pvt. Ltd. Gallery Statement Since our inception in 2000, we have devoted ourselves to bringing together artists of various disciplines who are exploring the confluence of Western and non-Western cultures. In addition to showing the work of our international roster of visual artists, we have been privileged to host numerous nonprofit cultural events. We strongly believe in the inseparable nature of art and will continue to stimulate the exchange of ideas and push intellectual, artistic and cultural boundaries by helping artists of all kinds exhibit, perform, and produce their work. Sundaram Tagore Executive Director 7 Natvar Bhavsar To say how Natvar Bhavsar’s paintings look, you have to say what his colors do. In Y-Tira, 1971, yellow floats in the middle of the canvas, expanding like a cloud. Or is it contracting, impinged upon by darker hues moving in from the edges? AARUV V, 2005, raises the same question: is the yellow expanding or contracting? Suspending the endless alternation of light and dark at a moment of optimum complexity, Bhavsar invokes flux with a static image. Charging the image with intimations of all that preceded it, all that will follow it, he immerses us in the fullness of time. At this point, a certain sort of viewer can be relied upon say, “Is that really what he does? Isn’t it the case, rather, that he covers the canvas with pigment?” As annoying as it may be, the deflationary voice of the skeptic should not be ignored. Paintings are, after all, physical objects, not impalpable emanations of mind or spirit, and so they pose a problem: how do mere things acquire exalted meanings? Because this problem is so difficult to solve, one is tempted to set it aside and go directly to the exaltations. For nearly four decades, writers have been praising Bhavsar’s paintings for their immensity of scale, for a luminosity that seems to hint at ultimate things. In Western terms, Bhavsar is an artist of the sublime—of “grandeur, magnificence, and urgency,” to borrow a flurry of words from Longinus, the Roman writer whose treatise “On Sublimity” was rediscovered in early modern times and did much to clear the way for the large ambitions of the Romantic artists and poets. It was Bhavsar’s version of the sublime that drew me to his paintings in the early 1970s. In his studio, Bhavsar plays the part of the artist isolated with his own intentions. That he has sustained those intentions over the decades should not distract us from a harsh truth: every artist lives on the verge of desperation, for past success provides no guarantees about the future. To face a blank canvas is to look into an emptiness that could easily become an abyss. And yet, despite his willingness to endure the loneliness and risks of the studio, Bhavsar’s art has been consistently joyous, even rapturous. It is worth remembering that his dry pigments, which he scatters with precision, have a more than incidental resemblance to the brightly colored powder that Indian celebrants throw at one another, along with buckets of tinted water, during the festival of Holi. Bhavsar is at once a thoroughly American painter and product of Indian culture. This is not paradoxical, for no culture is entirely enclosed by its own traditions. If that were so, Bhavsar never would have been drawn to the United States from his birthplace in Gujarat, on the western coast of India. If cultures were impermeable, Bhavsar could never have arrived at his early style, which blends the fragmentation of Cubism with the precision of Indian miniatures. In 1959 he received a Government Diploma in Art, having received an Art Masters degree at the C. N. School of Art, in the Gujarati capital of Ahmedabad, the year before. The year after, he was awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree from the English literature department of Gujurat University. Bhavsar came to America in 1962, at the age of twenty-eight. After a semester at the Philadelphia College of Art, he moved on to the Tyler School of Art, also in Philadelphia. Within a year, he had been accepted into the graduate art department of the University of Pennsylvania. There Bhavsar’s teachers included the painter Piero Dorazio, who often invited leading figures from New York to address his seminars. Over the next few years, Bhavsar met Robert Motherwell, David Smith, Barnett Newman, and other artists of their stature. These figures confirmed his faith in the high purpose of 8 9 art. And when he confronted the canvases in a Clyfford Still exhibition at Philadelphia’s Institute for Contemporary Art, in modulation of hues so subtle one is tempted to say that Bhavsar shows us not shapes but their evolution. Being is infused 1963, Bhavsar was suddenly sure that the time had come to leave behind all traces of the figure and every last remnant with becoming—and the feelings we find in Bhavsar’s paintings take on a tinge of metaphysics. of Cubist structure. For him, to turn toward the future was to enter the expansive spaces of contemporary field painting. Ultimately, though, the gorgeous complexities of his works permit only one certainty: they are sending us no By 1965 Bhavsar had settled in New York, where he gravitated toward the field-painters painters who were carrying on messages. However intense the emotions they stir up in us, they express no feelings. Nor do they illustrate any the legacy of Still, Newman, and Mark Rothko. At that point, these veterans were still alive. For Bhavsar, they are still theorems about states of being, whatever they may prompt us to speculate about such matters. At this point, one alive, and his painting can be seen as a contribution to the tradition they launched in the late 1940s. This is the tradition may embrace the always available ideal of beauty. Yet his canvases are too intricately textured, too demanding, to be of a specifically American Sublime, which uses color and gesture to invoke a sense of unbounded space and light. When seen as merely beautiful. When I saw this in 1972, I concluded that Bhavsar’s images “invite an uninterrupted flow I first saw Bhavsar’s work, in 1970, I understood him as an heir of Still and Rothko—and of Jackson Pollock, for there is a of perception, inflecting it so subtly and focusing it so intensely that looking finally becomes its own purpose.” I was similarity between Pollock’s paint-slinging and Bhavsar’s method of dusting a horizontal canvas with dry pigments. getting at a kind of autonomy that, paradoxically enough, addresses itself to the world beyond the boundaries of its self-enclosure—an autonomy that engages us instead of turning inward on itself. An autonomy that is not aloof, as in Writing about his work in 1972, I argued that he was of his time but not confined by it. In those days, critics liked to talk so much art of the past century, but endlessly inviting. of process and materiality and “objecthood.” Having gained currency in the struggle to account for Minimalism, these terms were ready to hand when Bhavsar’s paintings first went on view in New York, at the Max Hutchinson Gallery. Is an Decades went by and all that I intuited early on about the fecundity of Bhavsar’s art become, amazingly enough, art object—a Minimalist box, for example—to be understood as a consequence of the way it was made? This possibility more vivid. As he increased his already impressive command over his medium, the early premises of his imagery led by a labyrinthine path to “process art,” so-called. Because it included scatter pieces by Barry Le Va, Robert Morris, went through astonishing elaborations. Vast cycles of invention appeared, faded away, and reappeared transformed. and others, this new category took some of its legitimacy from Pollock’s drip and spatter method. Looked at a certain A few years ago, in an essay that traced the patterns of Bhavsar’s inventiveness, I found myself at a point to which way, the meaning of a dripped canvas by Pollock lies in the evidence it gives about the artist’s process. Materials strewn I have returned in these remarks—the point of feeling nearly overwhelmed by all that his paintings evoke. For his over gallery floors by Le Va and other process artists supplied even franker testimony along the same lines. So it was textures buzz, they vibrate and surge, with suggestions of light, weather, physical energy, the urgency of emotions, natural that certain critics of the early 1970s focused sharply on Bhavsar’s method, which is complex and yet deducible.