When the twentieth century is viewed through the psycho geography of a series of shifting and overlapping tectonic plates - through the modernism, decades of decolonisation and nationalism, postmodernism, decades of decolonialism, and post colonialism, and the intercultural dialogues between Asian, European and American Artists, intellectuals and cultural agents- what emerges is the story of several simultaneously evolving histories, or what I have termed for the purposes of this essay a system of “polymorphic modernisms.” As critic Geeta Kapur states, “it may be worth mentioning that modernism as it develops in postcolonial cultures has the oldest retroactive trajectories, and that these make up a parallel aesthetics. It is crucial that we do not see the modern as a form of determinism to be followed, in a manner of the stations of a cross, to a logical end. We should see our trajectories crisscrossing the western mainstream and, in their very disalignment from it, making up the ground that restructures the international.” With Fredric Jameson in mind Kapur continues, “the modern itself had a politicality far greater than we are taught to recognize. He (Jameson) notes the persistent use of vocabulary of political revolution in the aesthetic avant-gardes which complemented, perhaps even compensated for, the deep subjectivity to which modernist works were committed” Gaitonde’s consistently nonrepresentational works from 1959 onwards resist any intrinsic meaning or description and must be dealt with on their own uncompromised terms. One should experience them ontologically rather than in epistemic terms, given their resistance to narrativity. This, however, does not make them unmoored, universalising agentsrather they exist in time, and are contingent on the socialising factors that make them modern. One may simply point to the oeuvre of Kazimir Malevich (1879-1935), whose utopian abstraction and belief in the “zero of painting” or “objectlessness emerged within a milieu of revolutionary socialism.
In 2005, the artist achieved a new high in the auction market with the sale of Untitled (1962), offered in the Indian and Southeast Asian Art: Including Modern Indian Paintings from The Wilberding Collection by Sotheby's, which concluded on 20 September 2005 at New York, achieving a sale price of ₹1,05,38,400 ($240,000). This record marked a defining moment in the artist's market history, reflecting both the significance of the artwork and its reception within the broader art world.
Gaitonde, V.S. (Artist). Untitled, 1962 | Painting
