Sudhir Patwardhan is our preeminent painter of people and the city. As a young idealist, he used the cracks in our post-independence optimism to imagine a socialist realignment that was inherently humane and socially desirable. Aligning with the labouring class, or the people, as he described them, he adopted an aesthetics of realism, and as a Mumbaikar, saw the city as the natural theatre in which life unfolded. But with subsequent political, social and economic shifts, counterforces took centre stage, and belied his hopes. This was disappointing and painful. But as the world changed, he realized that holding on to his initial position would be dishonest and self-deceptive. He did not abandon the values that underpinned his initial position but undertook the task of reimagining it under the new, inappropriate circumstances, beginning by looking at himself and his immediate circle as honestly and truthfully as he could, without bravado and with humility and earnestness.
Sudhir’s drawings tell that story more intimately, and there are two strands to it. The first consists of small drawings; they are often sketchy and mostly notations made from life. They take us behind the canvas, into the studio and his mind, as it were. Here, the anatomy of his thinking mind, its hesitations, doubts and vulnerabilities, is laid bare. In them, we are made privy to his timorous first thoughts, to the exchanges between his eyes, mind and hand, and allowed to follow their gradual development. We are also let into his quiet conversations with artists, especially those from the past. To go through these drawings is like being at a rehearsal; it may lack the costumes, the colour and razzmatazz of the stage production, but it gives us a unique insight, an insider’s view into Sudhir’s art-making.
The second strand consists of large drawings that are as independent as his paintings. But as drawings, where marks remain distinct and not fused into a single skin as in paintings, they are more open-ended. The earlier among them has an aggressiveness of expression, a ‘cathartic impulse’ otherwise unusual in Sudhir’s art. In the later ones, the brashness moves from the outside to the inside, becomes more psychological, a part of the inner drama of self-scrutiny and an aspect of the subject matter rather than of execution. Looking at them, it gradually dawns on us that the inner experience of his own body serves as his matrix for imagining all other bodies and the world at large. They evoke a quiet disquiet, as in his paintings, and run parallel to them. They are independent expressions in another medium, and thus in another mode.
R. Siva Kumar,
Curator and art historian
