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Lot Essay
Krishnaji Howlaji Ara was a founding member of the Progressive Artists’ Group, a collective of like-minded avant-garde artists formed on the eve of Indian Independence in 1947. Born in the small town of Bolarum near Hyderabad, in 1914, Ara ran away to Bombay as a young child of just seven. A rebellious spirit and fervent believer in progressive causes, he was imprisoned for participating in Gandhi’s Salt Satyagraha movement in 1930 at the age of sixteen. Even at this young age, he was painting delicate watercolors, displaying an incredible aptitude for fine art despite having no formal training in the subject.
Making a living cleaning cars, Ara had a chance encounter with Rudy von Leyden, the art critic for The Times of India, and later with Walter Langhammer, editor of The Illustrated Weekly of India. Both saw his work and became staunch supporters, encouraging him to pursue art as a career. In the 1930s and 1940s, Ara’s early works focused on depictions of daily life, such as beggars in the city, villagers and rural landscapes. His talent earned him awards at the Bombay Art Society, including the Governor’s Prize, even before he co-founded the Progressive Artists’ Group.
As his career matured, Ara settled on a few select subjects, developing and refining his now iconic and recognizable style. These included still lifes and the female form, most commonly depicted nude and viewed from behind. His nudes were not intended to shock but instead combined the sculptural gravitas of Indian temple sculpture with the dynamism and spontaneity of Western modernism.
Untitled (Bathing Gopis) is one of the largest and most significant paintings by Ara, not only for its scale, medium and execution but also for its unique subject matter, which in many ways positions it as the apotheosis of his oeuvre. The painting is a monumental scene depicting a large group of gopis in various stages of undress and bathing in what appears to be a river. Ara skillfully creates layers of figures in this work, moving from the foreground to the background. At the center, he places his trademark image: a nude woman viewed from behind, adjusting her hair on the riverbank. Several other women are in different stages of bathing, some staring outward as if guarding their modesty by keeping watch for unwanted voyeurs.
Ara masterfully blends classical and modern themes here, weaving multiple complementary narratives into a single scene. Though not typically a painter of religious subjects, this work evokes the famous story of gopi vastraharan, a well-known episode from the Bhagavata Purana which chronicles the pastimes of Krishna. In this episode the young Krishna playfully takes the clothes of a group of gopis, or cowherd girls, while they bathe in the River Yamuna and hides them in a tree above the riverbank, leaving them with no choice but to emerge from the water to retrieve them. This scene from Krishna’s childhood in Vrindavan has been illustrated in century-old manuscripts and temple sculptures found across the Indian subcontinent, as well as in later popular genres like Kalighat paintings and the oleographs of Raja Ravi Varma. Modern South Asian artists from Nandalal Bose to Maqbool Fida Husain and Francis Newton Souza have also explored this scene in their work, as an exemplar of the multifaceted relationship between the human and divine.
Krishna is not overtly depicted in Ara’s painting, yet the riverbank setting, the state of his subjects’ undress, and the cautious glances of the gopis in the direction of the viewer all parallel this famous pastime. Ara is perhaps suggesting that these are the innocent moments before Krishna arrives and steals the clothes, and possibly is even positioning the viewer as Krishna stumbling upon this private and vulnerable moment. This is Ara at his most playful, adorning the gopis’ scattered clothing with floral patterns, an allusion to the still lifes he famously painted.
Notions of the ‘male gaze’ and the ‘voyeur’ are common themes in Western Modernist painting, perhaps most controversially explored by Édouard Manet in Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (1862–63), which depicts a nude and a female bather at a picnic with two fully dressed men by a riverbank. Ara’s work, however, appears more playful than Manet’s, and does not court controversy. Instead, it unites themes of nakedness and nudity, religion and social norms, resulting in what is perhaps the most modern and avant-garde painting of his career.
Making a living cleaning cars, Ara had a chance encounter with Rudy von Leyden, the art critic for The Times of India, and later with Walter Langhammer, editor of The Illustrated Weekly of India. Both saw his work and became staunch supporters, encouraging him to pursue art as a career. In the 1930s and 1940s, Ara’s early works focused on depictions of daily life, such as beggars in the city, villagers and rural landscapes. His talent earned him awards at the Bombay Art Society, including the Governor’s Prize, even before he co-founded the Progressive Artists’ Group.
As his career matured, Ara settled on a few select subjects, developing and refining his now iconic and recognizable style. These included still lifes and the female form, most commonly depicted nude and viewed from behind. His nudes were not intended to shock but instead combined the sculptural gravitas of Indian temple sculpture with the dynamism and spontaneity of Western modernism.
Untitled (Bathing Gopis) is one of the largest and most significant paintings by Ara, not only for its scale, medium and execution but also for its unique subject matter, which in many ways positions it as the apotheosis of his oeuvre. The painting is a monumental scene depicting a large group of gopis in various stages of undress and bathing in what appears to be a river. Ara skillfully creates layers of figures in this work, moving from the foreground to the background. At the center, he places his trademark image: a nude woman viewed from behind, adjusting her hair on the riverbank. Several other women are in different stages of bathing, some staring outward as if guarding their modesty by keeping watch for unwanted voyeurs.
Ara masterfully blends classical and modern themes here, weaving multiple complementary narratives into a single scene. Though not typically a painter of religious subjects, this work evokes the famous story of gopi vastraharan, a well-known episode from the Bhagavata Purana which chronicles the pastimes of Krishna. In this episode the young Krishna playfully takes the clothes of a group of gopis, or cowherd girls, while they bathe in the River Yamuna and hides them in a tree above the riverbank, leaving them with no choice but to emerge from the water to retrieve them. This scene from Krishna’s childhood in Vrindavan has been illustrated in century-old manuscripts and temple sculptures found across the Indian subcontinent, as well as in later popular genres like Kalighat paintings and the oleographs of Raja Ravi Varma. Modern South Asian artists from Nandalal Bose to Maqbool Fida Husain and Francis Newton Souza have also explored this scene in their work, as an exemplar of the multifaceted relationship between the human and divine.
Krishna is not overtly depicted in Ara’s painting, yet the riverbank setting, the state of his subjects’ undress, and the cautious glances of the gopis in the direction of the viewer all parallel this famous pastime. Ara is perhaps suggesting that these are the innocent moments before Krishna arrives and steals the clothes, and possibly is even positioning the viewer as Krishna stumbling upon this private and vulnerable moment. This is Ara at his most playful, adorning the gopis’ scattered clothing with floral patterns, an allusion to the still lifes he famously painted.
Notions of the ‘male gaze’ and the ‘voyeur’ are common themes in Western Modernist painting, perhaps most controversially explored by Édouard Manet in Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (1862–63), which depicts a nude and a female bather at a picnic with two fully dressed men by a riverbank. Ara’s work, however, appears more playful than Manet’s, and does not court controversy. Instead, it unites themes of nakedness and nudity, religion and social norms, resulting in what is perhaps the most modern and avant-garde painting of his career.