Retrospective recognition

The recognition for Sadanand K Bakre - as also for Indian sculpture in general - couldn't have come a moment sooner

In 1959, coincidentally the same year in which I was born, Sadanand K Bakre’s work was exhibited at the prestigious Gallery One in London. For the previously Bombay-based artist, the recognition followed a period of great struggle. Though his fellow contemporaries F N Souza and S H Raza had established successful careers by then in London and Paris respectively, and M F Husain had become the face of modern art in India, Bakre had found the going as a sculptor far from easy. He’d hawked his sculptures in a wheelbarrow in Hyde Park, undertaken jobs he was ill-suited for — including as mason and mortuary assistant — and though he’d caught the eye of the occasional art critic, his practice remained a mostly uphill task.

Perhaps it had to do as much with the fact that Bakre, even then, was ahead of his time. Disdaining, for most part, the use of bronze, stone or wood, he focussed on newer age materials that were more tensile but appeared frailer. His work reflected his modernist spirit, dealing with space and volume while parsing solidity in favour of form, light and shadow. It was part of the minimalist simplicity of the era, but it was also playful, combining within it elements of cubism as well as abstraction. Though it appeared spontaneous, it was obvious that intellectual consideration had a major role to play in its making. In this, Bakre’s affinity with the London Vorticists, a group that became known for its anti-realist, linear, jagged language, was apparent. 

“I saw everything mathematically. Everything depended on three parts, not four, so it became a spike,” he explained of his haiku-like forms in an interview in 1965. “It was a geometrical, mathematical phase. I felt the need to do this from some unknown experience of balance.” By now he had managed some degree of acclaim, having been exhibited at the Commonwealth gallery, South Kensington. His paintings of the time — he was a reluctant painter at best, continuing because painting materials were less expensive than his medium of choice — share a similar restraint and are evocative of similarly spiky forms. 

Sadanand K Bakre’s 1950s bronze sculpture, Untitled, was auctioned at Rs 15 million

Bakre returned to India in some ignominy, driven largely by setbacks in his personal life, and disappeared into oblivion. His death in 2007 was largely unreported, and he might have faded from public view but for works that have since begun to enter the secondary market, creating room for discussion around his work and career. The country of his birth, which had mostly ignored him in his lifetime, has now begun the process of reclaiming his legacy. Nowhere was this more visible than at the Sotheby’s Mumbai auction this week when an Untitled work by Bakre, lean in its sparseness but evocative in its form and balance, created a record. Large by his standards (61 inches in height, 40 inches in width), the 1950s bronze sculpture — looking more like an experiment in design — had an estimated value of Rs 4-6 million. Despite the high quality of the work, there was some hesitation that the steep estimate would put off sculpture aficionados. Such doubts were put to rest when the hammer went down at an exciting Rs 15 million, fetching the posthumous artist's work Rs 18.7 million (inclusive of buyer’s premium).

This recognition for Bakre — as also for Indian sculpture in general — couldn’t have come a moment sooner. Having languished in the shadow of the more successful Progressives for most part, no more fitting tribute could do justice to Bakre, whose centennial birth anniversary follows in 2020. Time, finally, for a retrospective?

Kishore Singh is a Delhi-based writer and art critic. These views are personal and do not reflect those of the organisation with which he is associated