In birth centenary year, a new Satish Gujral work

In his birth centenary year, a significant and previously undocumented, unexhibited conte drawing titled The Condemned (1957) from the Cyrus and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala family collection, now adds to Satish Gujral's oeuvre.

- Gayatri Sinha

In his birth centenary year, a significant and previously undocumented, unexhibited conte drawing titled The Condemned (1957) from the Cyrus and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala family collection, now adds to Satish Gujral's oeuvre. Compositionally similar to the oil painting of the same name, which was also made in 1957, this work ranks among Gujral's finest condemnations of the effects of war and forced migration, with the kind of seething, tragic intensity that set Gujral apart from his peers. With a major exhibition of his works poised for later in the year, this work may be the newest inclusion in a positive reassessment of Gujral's position among independent India's modernists.

Satish Gujral returned to India in 1955 in a blaze of glory after an apprenticeship for two years in Mexico under David Siqueiros. Training under the great Mexican muralists Diego Rivera and David Siqueiros against the backdrop of Mexico's response to the years of revolution, Gujral developed a temper for the nation as subject, as well as broad, free, open-handed strokes that he adapted to both his drawings as well as his paintings. As an apprentice to Siqueiros, the most politically radical of Los Tres Grandes (the three greats, Siqueiros, Rivera and José Clemente Orozco), and greatly influenced by the murals of Orozco, Gujral's own inclination was to adopt themes of social realism. The decade of 1947-57 became for Gujral a foundational expression of his response to the violence that he witnessed during the chaos of Partition.