Footnotes

克雷沙·迦納 田野及樹 油彩畫布 一九六零年作

THE PROPERTY OF A LADY

Provenance:
Leicester Galleries, London, United Kingdom
John/Jack Levy Collection
Thence by descent to the present owner
Private Collection, United Kingdom

Literature:
Krishen Khanna, United Kingdom: The Leicester Galleries, 1960, pg. 11 (listed as exhibit no. 14)

Exhibited:
Krishen Khanna, United Kingdom, The Leicester Galleries, October 1960, No. 14


Painted in oil in 1960, Fields and Trees is one of Krishen Khanna's earliest works and one of the best examples of his first forays into abstraction. Importantly, it foretells the artist's fascination with Chinese and Japanese ink paintings. It is an enigmatic tour de force filled with ethereal freestyled calligraphic brushstrokes punctuated by jewelled washes of colour; nature is dressed for all four seasons. The exhibition label of The Leicester Galleries, where Khanna held his first solo show, is still retained on the back of the painting. It carries not only provenance but also a title that invites the viewer to Khanna's secret garden, fields filled with trees.

It was only in 1962, after receiving a travelling fellowship from the John D. Rockefeller III Council for Economic and Cultural Affairs (CECA) in New York, did Khanna travel extensively in the Far East, studying the early 14th-century art, Sumi-e (Suibokuga) that was practised by Zen Buddhists in Japan. In 1964 he secured a second fellowship from CECA which allowed him to experiment with Abstract Expressionism in New York.

Described as India's last surviving modernist, Krishen Khanna, once a member of the radical Progressive Artist's Movement founded in Bombay in 1947, was fast friends with the likes of MF Husain, Raza, Souza, Tyeb and Gaitonde. Khanna and Gaitonde were living in New York at the same time and were admirers of Rothko, visiting the artist's studio together.

Khanna like Gaitonde was attracted to Zen Buddhism, its principles of calligraphy and the freedom of abstraction. Painting was a spiritual experience. In Sumi-e, only the elemental parts of a subject should be developed. The artist's oeuvre evolved from this and when asked by a journalist in 2018, the same question put forward by Gaitonde years earlier as to why he was giving it (abstraction) up now especially as it was so successful. Khanna explained by opening a book and pointing to a yellow abstract from 1959 saying, "It's a head. The head has grown out of what I did as I went on painting. It matured during the course of the work. It wasn't laid out as a head first, but I knew what it was going to be."