Dignity Dialogue -- ART -- October 2022
A Man of Colour
US-based artist Natvar Bhavsar’s signature is colour. Raj S. Rangarajan, writing from New York, explores the various hues that this well-known artist explores in his work.
Natvar Bhavsar
IN July-August, well-known Aicon Art Gallery from New York hosted paintings of New Yorker and octogenarian, seasoned artist, Natvar Bhavsar at a solo exhibition titled ‘Natvar Bhavsar Part III’. In this current batch, Natvar Bhavsar celebrates the outdoors as he describes “the billowing cloud-like areas in AASO and ADREE whose surfaces are striated like mountainous ranges seen from outer space.” To a question about how the process works, the artist expands: “Despite living in New York for around 60 years, my artistic process is deeply rooted in Indian tradition. My focus of colour and pigment is often derived from the Hindu festival of Holi where powdered colour is used in abundance to show love.”
“My process starts from the ground up – I lay the canvas on the studio floor and sift powdered pigments on the surface of the canvas in a controlled rhythm and movement, applying fixatives like resin and oil at crucial intervals to create layer upon layer of complex colour. This technique demands emotional, physical and spiritual involvement to create sublime visual topographies that generate a spectrum of emotion within us,” he adds. The formal structures of the early years have been eradicated to give way to a much more inclusive, expansive and dramatic composition, which Bhavsar continues to explore and paint today.
In essence, this ‘avatar’ marks a crescendo of his career where he has truly found his unique visual language – so powerful, pure, and serene. Bhavsar is part of a legacy of artists who exploited the expressive power of colour by deploying it in large fields. Artists like Barnett Newman, Helen Frankenthaler, Robert Motherwell and Morris Louis managed to transcend the normal, if something like ‘normal’ exists for them, and express a yearning for transcendence and the infinite.
Art connoisseurs would know and recall, “Cubism was a revolutionary new approach to representing reality.” Artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque are credited with “inventing this genre around 1907-1908, and in this (oeuvre) objects and figures are shown in the same picture resulting in paintings that appear fragmented and abstracted.”
Untitled XVIII, 1973, dry pigments with oil and acrylic mediums on paper
AASO, 1989
ADREE, 1989
All images are courtesy of Aicon Gallery, New York
Bhavsar’s canvases in an earlier iteration represented a move away from the cubist blocks of the 1960s and vertical flashes of the 1970s toward an exploration
of colour fields and the universality of colour. In the artist’s own words, “Every time I look at a painting, what invites me to get absorbed is the experience of colour.”
Being Colourful
Claiming ‘colour’ as his medium, Natvar Bhavsar has explored the sensual,
emotional and intellectual resonance of colour for over 50 years. Bhavsar has
exhibited widely in New York, where he has been a long time resident and central figure in the art world – one of the few remaining original artists from the Soho school – and with a variety of international galleries and museums. His paintings evoke influences from his childhood in India – surrounded by vivid textiles, practicing ‘rangoli’, witnessing the Holi festival – and his adulthood in 1970s New York City. The immediacy of Bhavsar’s art results from the controlled spontaneity of his process. The works are constructed using dry pigment that is often sifted, poured or otherwise dispersed on to prepared surfaces. The dry pigment is a direct physical and spiritual link to the artist’s connection with India.
Each gesture marks a specific distance from the work’s surface, a particular density of colour, and a measured movement of the body. The resultant surface
is grainy and made up of a density of colour in varying tones. For Bhavsar, the goal of his paintings is “to release the energies that colours have locked within them, and to produce a continuum of energies that expands beyond the pictures’ limit.” In his essay on the artist, art critic Irving Sandler notes, “Indeed, what Bhavsar has drawn from Indian life and culture, what he prizes in it, makes his art distinctive and valuable. In sum, Bhavsar has a personal vision that both continues American colour-field painting and embodies his Indian heritage.”
Beginnings and Influences
Born in Gothva (Gujarat) in India in 1934, Bhavsar studied at Seth C N College of Fine Arts in Ahmedabad, graduating in English Literature from Gujarat University and in 1962 moved to the US. He was awarded the John D. Rockefeller III Fund Fellowship for his MFA at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Fine Arts, which he completed in 1965. At this art school young Natvar met Janet Brosious who was majoring in art education and painting in 1963. While Bhavsar is known for his gargantuan paintings, Janet worked on tiny canvases, and is reported to have disclosed to a reporter, “I am a painter at heart. Painting is central to my life and living with an intellectual artist like Natvar over five decades has been a constant education.”
Their cozy Soho loft in Manhattan also doubles as their home, and they have twins. At his MFA program, Bhavsar met eminent colourists and artists such as Andy Warhol and fellow abstract expressionist Mark Rothko. He was soon an influential member of the New York School of Colorists. Bhavsar’s enormous works are created using dry pigment released on to the canvas in patterns that parallel the movements of the artist’s body as he works. Journalist and art critic Barbara Pollack uses the words ’meditative’, ‘transcendent’ and ‘beautiful’ to describe Bhavsar’s “method of brushing dry pigment through screens on to wet canvas soaked in acrylic medium in more than 80 layers.”
To a question about how his technique works, Bhavsar explains, “It is like the Indian tradition of sand painting, where you soak the canvas with acrylic-based liquid binders that absorb and hold the fine pigment powder. You then apply the base using a sifting technique with a screen, during which layers of fine, concentrated pigment are sprinkled and drizzled over the canvas (or paper), which is laid out on the floor so that the artist can walk around the painting and work on it from all sides.”
Record-Breaking Prices
A large Bhavsar abstract painting completed in 2000 titled Sundervana sold for a record USD 53,125 against an estimated bid price of USD 20,000-30,000 at Doyle New York’s auction of Modern and Contemporary Art in November 2012. According to New York auctioneer Christie’s, in March 2022, art collectors Mahinder and Sharad Tak picked up Bhavsar’s ‘Aanang’, (painted in 1995) directly from the artist. Bhavsar embellished this large space with dry pigments with oil and acrylic on canvas. The estimate for this painting ranged from USD 100,000 to USD 150,000, but the precise price was not disclosed. A riot of purple,
orange, yellow and blue and other blends on the palette mark Aanang, currently on display at the Taks’ home.
Picture shows artist Natvar Bhavsar (left) with Elwyn Lynn, Australian artist and art critic in New York, 1976. Photo was taken by Natvar’s wife, Janet Brosious Bhavsar, who too is an artist and
professional photographer.
The Perspective
The artist’s sensibilities of the art form are brushed by his background in India and later experimentations in the United States where he acquired an avid following. Bhavsar’s fascination for mineral pigmentation seems to be a two-way
conversation with his oil-on canvas. His 1982 Sorathee defines the artist’s sense of space – rather the expanse of space he consciously creates – that helps him revel in colourful abstractionist abandon. Every individual viewer of Sorathee sees a different dimension in the 5,788 square inches of freedom. Once the viewer captures this emotion he or she seems to be transported into some notional space capsule where – happily ensconced – he is king, subject and master.
While the verticals show the brown, yellow, pink and other multifarious hues in
graphic detail, one is left to ponder as to what the artist had in mind as he developed his masterpiece that sold at USD 100,000 on March 16, 2022 though the initial estimate was much less, i.e., USD 50,000-70,000. On his creative process, Bhavsar says, “In the way I work, there is really no periphery at all. The brushstrokes, or the presence of elements that I can lay down could be as large as I want or as small as I want. It becomes a very, very complex sort of enjoyment.” (Artist statement, Paola Gribaudo ed., ‘Color Immersion Natvar Bhavsar in Conversation’, Natvar Bhavsar: Poetics of Color, Milan, 2008, P.14).
Prajit Dutta, Harry Hutchison and artist Natvar Bhavsar
Praise All Around
American art critic Carter Ratcliff opines in ‘Poetics of Color’ on Bhavsar’s use
of colour: “The colour’s values are those of variety, subtlety and intensity; it has the capacity to draw out, to expand and deepen, perceptual experience.” The book explored how skillfully colour was being used just as a musician would
explore sound. Bhavsar’s artistic reach has been so extensive and prolific that his works have been displayed and seen at more than 800 private and public
collections in New York City, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, Australia, the Library of Congress, the Australian National Gallery and in art capitals in India and the Middle East.
Among top companies displaying abstractions from Bhavsar are American
Express Company, ATT, Chase Manhattan Bank, et al. In conclusion, while the
art market in North America is not really bearish, industry watchers wait with cautious optimism. The art market is reportedly hoping for some form of resurgence after a virtual two-year closure. Art auctioneers and connoisseurs, collectors and buyers look forward to more active merchandising opportunities among artists of all hues, whatever their genre, and wherever they are located in the world.
