Description
PROPERTY OF A TRUST <br><br>
Mixed media on paper<br>
57 ½ x 19 ⅛ in. (145.8 x 48.7 cm.)<br>
Signed 'ARA' lower left<br><br>
K.H. Ara is best known for his visually pleasing still lifes of fruits, flowers and vases and his gentle, contemplative renderings of the female nude. After spending most of the 1950s experimenting with still lifes, the 1960s saw him focus on the female nude. In fact, in 1962 he had an exhibition at the Taj Gallery exclusively showing his nude paintings and the following year his Black Nude series formed part of the inaugural exhibition at Pundole Art Gallery. As an artist, Ara was frequently criticised for having a weak understanding of anatomy, but as is seen in the current example and other works, he had mastered the subtleties of the female anatomy far better than his sternest critics suggest.<br><br>
Ara was essentially an intuitive painter that came from very humble beginnings. At the age of seven, he left his hometown for Mumbai, where he was hired as a member of domestic staff by a European lady. In 1930, by the age of sixteen, he was working for a Japanese company washing cars for Rs. 18 a month. Fortuitously, during the bombing of Pearl Harbour, his Japanese employer fled Bombay, leaving Ara to take care of his home. Ara lived there and the small employee quarters would serve as his studio for the rest of his life. <br><br>
The current work is a rare example of a standing nude painted in an unusually large format. Ara only painted very few works in this tall, narrow format, usually preferring more standard sizes of art paper. The results are also dramatically different, as most of Ara’s nudes do not exude the tenderness he has captured here. He shows the beautifully proportioned back of a lady who stands in a gentle tribhanga or s-shaped posture, reminiscent of classical Indian dance. She holds up her long black hair, delicately exposing the graceful nape of her neck that continues down to the elegant curve of her spine, the narrow waist and the gently flaring hips and rounded buttocks, before tapering at her shapely ankles. Ara’s subtle shadowing and softly applied ink add to the overall sensuousness of her figure, heightened by the hint of her right breast that is modestly covered by her hair. The alluring position of the almost life-size figure captivates the viewer and radiates a sensuality that makes it difficult to look away. <br><br>
Yashodhara Dalmia questions to which artistic tradition Ara’s nudes belong, and concludes that they stand somewhere between the classical tradition and the modern idiom. ‘In many essential ways, Ara was allied to the classicists of the early nineteenth century. His massive nudes with their backs to the viewer remind one of Ingres’ <i>Baigneuse de Valpincon</i> (1808), one of the most beautiful yet simple delineations of a woman. Her gently curved posterior, balanced on a pair of shapely legs, satisfies all notions of beauty, gracefully heightened by an unbroken outline.’ (Yashodhara Dalmia, <i>The Making of Modern Indian Art</i>, New Delhi, 2001, p. 138) She concludes that while he may have been inspired by several sources, ‘his commitment was to modernism and everything was grist to the mill of painterly language (<i>ibid</i>., p. 139)