Vasudeo S. Gaitonde (India, 1924-2001)

Composition

Footnotes

Provenance:
Morris Graves 1963-68, acquired directly from the artist in Bombay
Humboldt Arts Council, San Francisco, 24 October 1968

In 1963 Morris Graves visited India at the invitation of Indira Gandhi. He met her and her father, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, in New Delhi.
It was a close personal friend and later biographer of Indira Ghandi, Pupul Jayakar, with whom Graves visited Gaitonde's studio on 20th February 1963.

Such was the impact of his works that Graves sent an aerogram that same day to Dan and Mariam Johnson of the Willard Gallery, New York:

...The second thing is this, today Mrs. Jayakar took me to the studio of a Bombay painter named GAITONDE – age 32[*] & one of the finest painters I have ever seen. He is very little known. He's as fine – or superb – as Mark Rothko at his best. He paints in oil – average size 34" x 26" – 38" x 48" – 5ft. x 4 ft. a fine person and will be a world-known painter one of these days. You should be the ones to show him first. I told Mrs. Jayakar so. She agreed. Said she'd help. He is 100 per cent artist – a great & sincere (+ humble - + unconscious gift). I bought 1 superb oil & six super–superb ink drawings.
He is an abstract painter with something unspeakably beautiful & clean added. They are the most beautiful landscapes of the mind plus light and composed with very great simplicity. You too will be very awed by him....

(*Gaitonde was actually 39 at the time)

A copy of this letter is preserved in the Special Collections and Archives at University of Oregon Libraries.

It was this communication which lead to a solo exhibition in the USA at the Willard Gallery, who also represented artists with similar East Asian philosophies such as Mark Tobey and Morris Graves.

These six ink on paper drawings were acquired by Morris Graves alongside two oil on canvas paintings which were recently sold at Bonhams New York in September 2014 (Untitled 1961 for $1,068,000 and Untitled 1963 for $1,200,000).