Akbar Padamsee
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A brief biography
Sharmila Ganesan Ram, Sep 7, 2020: The Times of India
MUMBAI: Famous modernist artist Akbar Padamsee was a legendary Mumbai painter - also a sculptor, photographer, engraver and lithographer - who believed an artist needed the mind of both a mathematician and a poet.
The JJ School of Art graduate hit the headlines in his first solo itself at the Jehangir Art Gallery when the police arrested him for obscenity. The bone of contention was a painting titled 'Lovers' that showed a man's hand touching a breast. He refused to back down, and it was only after testimony by his fellow progressive M F Husain and art critic Rudolf von Leyden that the judge cleared him. Despite that early brush with controversy, Padamsee remained relatively low-profile as compared to his contemporaries. It's only in the last 10 years that prices for his work have been climbing. The 22-year-old - one of eight siblings among whom was ad guru Alyque Padamsee - moved to Paris when his friend Syed Haider Raza bagged a scholarship in 1951. The French sojourn deeply influenced his artistic journey.
Some of his more famous works are from the 'Grey Period' when Padamsee, at the age of 31, decided to go monochromatic.
"I used black and white and grey because I wanted to understand what colour means," Padamsee said in an interview. He did return to colour, and his experiments resulted in distinctive earthy metascapes. Asked how he started on the metascapes, Padamsee, who had a deep interest in Sanskrit and spirituality, said the idea came to him while reading Kalidasa. "The controlled cadence of the colours breaks into a throbbing intensity as the artist in his most masterly works, evokes infinite time and space," wrote art critic Yashodhara Dalmia about his work.
He explored a wide range of mediums, and remained experimental and individualistic throughout his illustrious career.
Padamsee's quasi-spiritual bent of mind expressed itself in various genres - couples, still-life, grey works, mirror images - across a range of media including oil, plastic emulsion, water colour, sculpture, printmaking, computer graphics, and photography. Later in his career, Padamsee used computer graphics and made two short abstract films titled 'Syzygy' and 'Events in a Cloud Chamber' where he animated a set of geometric drawings.
His work was exhibited in numerous exhibitions in India and abroad. In 2010, he was awarded the Padma Bhushan. Other awards include a gold medal from the Lalit Kala Akademi in 1962, JD Rockefeller Foundation fellowship in 1965, Kalidas Samman by the government of Madhya Pradesh in 1997, Lalit Kala Ratna Puraskar in 2004, the Dayawati Modi Award in 2007, Roopdhar award by Bombay Art Society in 2008 and Kailash Lalit Kala award in 2010.
The hole that his departure left moved many. "Akbar Padamsee has passed into the ages. I lose another early mentor, from whose guidance in matters both philosophical and practical I benefited greatly in my early 20s. Whenever we met, over the years, we came back to our shared interests: Sanskrit, rasa theory, Shaiva thought," tweeted poet and cultural theorist Ranjit Hoskote.
