The idea of the abstract

Next week, when Gopi Gajwani's show of abstract art goes up at Delhi's Shridharani gallery, after a gap of three years, it will follow the path first trod by abstractionists of the likes of V S Gaitonde, Ram Kumar, S H Raza (among the masters) to Manish Pushkale (as possibly the youngest of the ilk).

Yet, the journey of abstract art in India, despite the success of the gurus and the prices their works now command, has not been easy.

Largely, this is because the foundation of realism in art gave way to the figurative romanticism of the Bengal school, and has taken such deep roots that even the Bombay Progressive art movement faced an uphill task over what were considered Westernised notions in modern art.

But modern art has never been easy to assimilate anywhere, so that abstraction, considered to have begun with Wassily Kandinsky in 1910 (though critics point to earlier works by Monet showing the way), came into prominence when European avante-garde artists fled to New York following Nazi persecution.

This led to further refinement, and the creation of abstract expressionism under Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko. It influenced a number of Indian artists in the 1960s when it took root in India, but four decades on, that hold is still tentative.

"It has a greater acceptance," concedes Gajwani, "but if I was painting figurative works instead of abstracts, it would sell more." It would definitely earn more.

Gajwani's latest body of work marks a sense of departure from his earlier canvases "" the colours as well as the spaces are more controlled, the shapes better defined, and there is a logical movement of the eye from one part of the canvas to another. The blacks "" though he's using them less now "" are more distinctive, and there is less flexibility in the manner in which he creates his colours or tells his story.

On the face of it, abstraction is a departure from representational accuracy. It is the extent of abstraction that is the challenge, for the artist and the viewer. What are you to make of a work of art you cannot understand?

That communicates only a haphazard palette of colours? In Ram Kumar's work, you can spot the village roofs amidst the greens of the field, in F N Souza's work, the church steeple is at least a little identifiable, but when the abstraction becomes a random sampling of colour, does it still communicate something?

"It's a sublime way of looking at art," says Gajwani. "These," he points to little glow-spots of colours emerging from a dense black, "are like whispers...". Clearly, though, the intention of abstract art is not to be nothing.

"The point," explains Gajwani, "is to look at a canvas and see different things. Somebody sees colour, another sees forms, a third sees shapes, somebody else sees it totally differently. Artists abstract realism so that they are moving away from a single interpretation to an art that finds meaning in one's own brain."

It is a breathless evocation of his own oils, some 20 of which we will get to see at the gallery. But the more important direction is that there is a determined idea to resist the pull of the popular, to steer away from more acceptable forms, even kitsch, to retain the purity of the idea of abstraction.

The high price of abstract art (now) is one thing that could ensure increasing awareness of perhaps one of the most misunderstood ideas in contemporary art, but it is an understanding of the abstract that is its most important missing link.