Publication Information
The Crucible of Painting, published to coincide with a major retrospective of Sabavala's work at the National Gallery of Modern Art, attends to these questions. This book is a revised, expanded and updated successor to Ranjit Hoskote's definitive 1998 biography of the artist, Pilgrim, Exile, Sorcerer: The Painterly Evolution of Jehangir Sabavala. Hoskote locates Sabavala in the various contexts of his upbringing, his education in India and Europe, his quest for selfhood and belonging in an India newly liberated from colonial rule, and his efforts to reconcile his private aesthetic impulse with the pressures of his public role as an artist committed to viewership. Beginning with the formative years of his childhood and early youth in the milieu of Bombay's Parsi haute bourgeoisie, the narrative follows Sabavala through his training as an artist in London and Paris, and his return from the domain of the ateliers to the rough theatre of India. The book traces his development, through an apprenticeship to Cubism and a breakthrough into the incandescent 'visionary landscape', to the rich fictions of person and ambience that form the vehicle of his figurative art. By turns introspective and convivial, lyrical and flamboyant, elusive and candid, Jehangir Sabavala’s paintings invite us to celebrate the survival of beauty in a turbulent epoch; they remind us of the transcendent dimension of life, the conditions of grace and hope.