Don’t Call Him a ‘Master’ Artist

Akbar Padamsee, whose paintings are suddenly finding huge valuations in the art market, talks about why numbers matter, the process of art and an obscenity case with amusing moments

For the longest of time, while the works of artists like Tyeb Mehta, MF Husain and SH Raza were being sold for astronomical sums, it was a mystery that Akbar Padamsee was not being valued in the same league. Padamsee, too, belongs to that category of Indian artists called Masters who have had a seminal influence on post-Independence Indian art. Then something strange happened. Along with the 2008 financial bust came a recession in the art market. Padamsee’s paintings, however, began to go against the trend. Last year, a work of his was auctioned for Rs 6.3 crore and just last month, another work of his was auctioned at Christie’s for Rs 6.7 crore. In a dark and depressing time for the art world, he had soundly trundled over the $1 million mark.

Padamsee is 84 years old and it’s been almost six decades since he started exhibiting his works. You would expect him to be above things like numbers. That is not the case. “The market should have recognised the value of my work much earlier,” he says. “Valuation is important because that is how you are judged. Nobody wants to look at a thing. They only hear things. They will hear ‘He sold for seven crore’ and will say ‘bada artist hai’.” One reason he cites for his works not being valued properly is that he was bad at promoting them. “I was more of a recluse. I was no marketer at all.”

And yet, in the first solo show he did in India, he got instant fame thanks to the Bombay Police. That was in 1954, and the exhibition had nudes. On the opening day, a man came up to Padamsee and asked for photographs of some of them. He said he didn’t have any. Later, a lawyer present there told Padamsee that it was an inspector named Kanga from the CID. The next day, the inspector came in his uniform and told Padamsee, “Under Section 292 of the IPC, I order you to remove these paintings.” It was being done at the behest of Morarjee Desai, the Home Minister then. Padamsee refused and the case went to court. In the painting for which he was charged, a man has his hand on the breast of a woman next to him. The judge asked Padamsee why it was necessary to show this. “I said, ‘My subject is ‘lovers’. There’s only one way to convey that, and that is by a gesture. This gesture is very common and is used in hundreds of Indian sculptures,’” he says. The judge then called the inspector to the stand and asked if he agreed. The inspector said he didn’t. Padamsee says, “He told the judge only a baby has a right to touch a woman’s breast! The judge said, ‘Inspector where did you find this milking theory?’ The inspector then said, ‘In the course of making love, accidentally you may touch the breast.’”

The case got thrown out, but the police appealed in the High Court. Padamsee had to produce witnesses and one of the names suggested was that of Husain. “He agreed. My lawyer asked him what would he say to the judge. Husain said, ‘Very simple. I’ll say, what breasts and what hand? Mujhe to kuch dikhta hi nahin hai (I don’t see any of that). I’ll say I see only a circle and horizontal lines.’” The lawyer said he couldn’t put Husain on the stand because the judge would then send him to jail for contempt of court. Ultimately, Rudy von Leyden, art critic of The Times of India, became a witness, and they won here too.

To show how much Padamsee capitalised on this blizzard of publicity, here’s a snatch of an article that appeared on him in 1960, six years later, in Link magazine: ‘Anyone of lesser calibre in Padamsee’s place would have capitalised on all that happened subsequently. Padamsee retired into a shell of silence, went abroad, acquired maturity and returned. Except for an occasional canvas on display at Gallery 59, as if to remind the public that he was working, Padamsee had almost retired. Last week, with an exhibition of 12 oils sponsored by Bal Chabda of Gallery 59, he has staged a comeback with a bang…’

The work that sold at Christie’s last month for Rs 6.7 crore is called Cityscapes. It was done in 1959. Padamsee does not remember exactly how much it sold for at the time, but says it couldn’t have been more than Rs 5,000. “At the time, I had done a whole series of paintings on grey and most of the buyers were artists.”

He betrays a sense of irritation when you use the term ‘Master’ for him. “You know why we are called ‘Masters’?. Six or seven galleries decided that the only way to launch young painters was to [ensure] that [Padamsee, Husain, Raza, Souza, Tyeb Mehta, etcetera] don’t belong to contemporary art. So they decided to call us Masters. We had done shows on contemporary art and they said, ‘You can’t use this title anymore. You have been around for the past 50 to 60 years, tum Master ban gaye.’” Some of the young artists wanted to meet him to find out what he felt about being made a Master. “There were about 20-30 of them. They asked me, ‘How do you feel?’ I said, ‘I feel fine’ but I was worried about them.” He pointed to a few of them and said that he was fairly certain that these artists would be called Masters when they grew old. “I told them, ‘About the rest of you, I have my doubts. What will you be? You won’t be contemporary and you won’t be Masters. What will you do?’”

Padamsee is a raconteur. Stories and memories pour out of him unbidden. He talks about meeting Giacometti, the great sculptor, and after a long conversation, being anxiously told to come along to Giacometti’s home so that Padamsee could tell his lover what had kept him out so late. He talks about Picasso giving a lesson to one of his friends who was going through a dry spell. (The artist took him for a walk and suddenly started picking up things from the ground. He then said, ‘Have you understood?’ Padamsee’s friend said he did not. Picasso said, ‘I am a finder. I find things. You are a searcher. You search for things. That’s why you have a crisis and I never have one.’)  Padamsee talks about Husain doing a service to all artists by starting a buyback offer in the 1960s when no one’s art was selling (people immediately started buying and no one wanted to return anything because they were proud owners).

But Padamsee is equally fascinating when he talks about the process of art itself. His work is abstract. On whether it worried him if people did not understand his work, he says, “I don’t care. Not because I am heartless, but if I start to worry about them, I won’t be able to do my own work. I am responsible to art. If I can push the frontiers of art even one inch, then I have done my job.” And then immediately comes another memory, a story.  “I had a show in Paris and the director of the museum said, ‘Wonderful paintings, why don’t you paint like everybody else?’ I said, ‘As the director of the museum, you are giving me very bad advice.’” The director hurried away humiliated. A woman next to him asked him why he had to tell the man off.  “I said, ‘I told him the truth’. She said, ‘If you keep telling truths like this, you will rot like a dry leaf.’ I said, ‘In my veins rivers are flowing. I won’t rot. You will rot.’”

About seven or eight years ago, when he must have been in his late seventies, Padamsee discovered an entirely new medium: photography. Initially he would photograph his nude model and then use that in his drawing. But when he saw the photographs, he decided that he needed to explore this art form. “What interested me most was the way the light falls. I had been with my daughter to Goa. On one beach, there were women walking in the nude. She told me, ‘All these girls are walking nude and you are not looking at them.’ I said they are not nude. If everything is lit there’s no form. She said, ‘You are right’.” He had a flat in Juhu where sunlight used to stream in. He’d photograph his model there. He didn’t tell her what pose to take, but once she’d taken it, he’d ask her to hold it for some time. He let sunlight and shade both play on the model’s body. “I photograph from all sides. I take six or seven photos of a pose. I then put it on my computer and decide [which to use].”

Art is to him both a conscious and subconscious process. Art happens in the subconscious, selection is done by the conscious mind. “You must allow your subconscious to come out. It’s like a child who is always asked to shut up. After some time, the child will stop talking. So if you don’t listen to your subconscious mind, it will stop speaking. The conscious mind will tell you ‘yes’ or ‘no’. The subconscious has no judgment. It is just there. The conscious selects.” When he starts on a work, not only does he have no conception of what the end will be, he is hostile to this idea. “I don’t want to know. Because then you cannot create. You cannot make it appear. It appears.”

About The Author

Madhavankutty Pillai

Madhavankutty Pillai has no specialisations whatsoever. He is among the last of the generalists. And also Open chief of bureau, Mumbai  

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