Untitled

Sculptor-painter S. K. Bakre was a founding member of the Progressive Artists’ Group, and like his peers F. N. Souza and S. H. Raza, left India to make his career in London. His nascent modernist vocabulary found full freedom to bloom in the West, where he lived for the major part of his life though he returned to India in the last phase. This Untitled oil is an example of the alacrity with which Bakre embraced the modernist art trends of Europe. The nude figure in the woods, or behind two heavy concrete columns, is distinctly Caucasian, and the rendition of the painting itself points to abstractionism as being practiced in the West in mid-twentieth century.