Page 110 - Eye of the beholder

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SHIVAx CHAVADA [1914-1990]: THE DANCING LINE
The name of Chavada brings to mind his beautiful, kinetic and graceful dancing lines rendered with poetic will in his Bharat Natyam series. Artists as Chavada, K.K. Hebbar, P.T. Reddy, Baburao Sadwelkar, N.S. Bendre among others worked at a period in India’s modernist history particularly in Bombay in the 1940s and 50s, creating works that cannot be reduced to any stylistic group. Their contribution was not only modernist but offered paradigm shift within the framework of subject matter and styles. Their works were unorthodox, rooted in their cotemporary reality and thematically represented the middle and working class, landscapes, dance forms, popular culture as cock fights etc.
Chavada born in 1914 in Navsari Gujarat came from a middle class Parsi family and arrived in Bombay to join the Sir J.J. School of Art in 1930. An opportunity came his way, which in Pre- Independent India was rare and that was to travel to London in 1935 and study at the Slade School under Professor Randolph. In 1937 he studied at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere in Paris where he had an opportunity to work alongside Leon Bakst and Picasso in designing the sets for the Diaghlev Ballet. At the academy he perfected the mastery of draughtsmanship, which was to serve as a firm foundation in expressing his experiences later. This enabled him in the development of his aesthetic sensibility as well as the process of essentialization that had become the saliency of his art. Chavada’s love of culture, heritage, temples and rural life of India was a special fascination he held and travelled not only extensively across the country but also to Burma as well as Europe in search for forms, subjects and themes that would serve as grist for his creative mill. But it was the small towns and rural areas of Gujarat which provided him the much needed subject matter as he was most familiar with it, having spent his childhood there, which engaged him initially.
The rural environment of his home town enabled him in his quest for individual expression as well as a visual language, when he intently studied characteristics, physiognomic features, postures and movements of different classes of people and of animals as well as the moods of nature surrounding and determining them. He studied temple sculptures with similar intensity observing the postures, actions and movement as depicted by Indian shilpins. Having closely scrutinized the life around him, Chavada with sensitivity and empathy depicted his subjects. And it is no wonder that he was able to impart a rhythmic prana or a sense of inner movement that resided in his forms, be it a housewife at her chores, a dancer, cock fights or even a resting bull. Judiciously he engaged with certain traditions of art be it the cubist broken structure, the folk elements or ethnic authenticity of his protagonists, that in many ways was responsible for making Chavada’s art distinct and with an inherent dynamism.
His interest in dance was well known, established by his numerous drawings that Chavada had captured with intimacy, acute perception and sensitivity. His varied interests besides dance were theatre, opera and music, all of which found expression in his paintings. His wife Khurshid Vajifdar along with her sister was an accomplished exponent of Bharatnatyam and Kathakali dance forms. In concerts, armed with a tiny torch, he sat in the audience in the dark, deftly and unerringly sketching changing forms and postures as Khurshid or other Indian and classical ballet dancers danced. The quasi abstracts he created remained untitled as products