Akbar Padamsee

Akbar Padamsee (12 April 1928 – 6 January 2020) was an Indian artist and painter, considered one of the pioneers in modern Indian painting along with S.H. Raza, F.N. Souza and M.F. Husain.

Over the years he also worked with various mediums from oil painting, plastic emulsion, water colour, sculpture, printmaking, to computer graphics, and photography.

In addition, he worked as a film maker, sculptor, photographer, engraver, and lithographer.

Today his paintings are among the most valued by modern Indian artists.

He was still studying fine art at the school, when the Progressive Artists' Group (PAG) was formed in 1947 by Francis Newton Souza, S. H. Raza, and M. F. Husain.

The group was to have a lasting impact on Indian art.

By the time he received his diploma he was already associated with the group.

In late 1950, Raza was awarded a French government scholarship, and he invited Padamsee to accompany him to Paris.

Padamsee left for Paris in 1951, where artist Krishna Reddy introduced him to the surrealist Stanley Hayter, who became his next mentor.

Padmasee soon joined his studio, "Atelier 17".

His first exhibition was held in Paris in 1952.

The artists exhibited anonymously, thus he shared the prize awarded by the French magazine Journal d'Arte with the painter Jean Carzou.

Akbar married Solange Gounelle, in Paris in 1954.

The couple had one daughter, Raisa Padamsee.

His very first solo show was held at the Jehangir Art Gallery in 1954, and soon he became one of leading artists.

He received the Lalit Kala Akademi Fellowship in 1962, a fellowship by the Rockefeller Foundation in 1965 and was subsequently invited to be an artist-in-residence by the University of Wisconsin–Stout.

He returned to India in 1967.

As a member of many artistic committees, he took part in the development of the collections of the Bharat Bhawan museum of Bhopal, and created the VIEW (Vision Exchange Workshop).

Akbar moved to India in 1968 and lived and worked in Mumbai with his wife Bhanumati Padamsee

He had a number of siblings, but the most notable of them is Alyque Padamsee, who was a celebrated theatre personality & advertising mogul who headed the Lintas Bombay Ad agency.

In the last years of his life, Padamsee and his wife Bhanu are reported to have moved into the Isha Yoga Center, Coimbatore permanently, after having visited the centre a few times several years ago.

He was awarded the Lalit Kala Akademi Fellowship (Lalit Kala Ratna) by the Lalit Kala Akademi, India's National Academy of Arts, in 2004, the Kalidas Samman from the Madhya Pradesh Government in 1997 for Plastic Arts and the Padma Bhushan, India's third highest civilian honour in 2010.

Padamsee was born into a traditional Khoja Muslim family hailing from the Kutch region of Gujarat.

Their ancestors had belonged to the Cāraṇa caste of court poets and historians.

The family had been settled in the nearby Kathiawar region for some generations; Padamsee's grandfather, who had been the sarpanch (headman) of Vāghnagar, a village in Bhavnagar district, had earned the honorific name "Padamsee" (a corruption of "Padmashree") after he distributed his entire granary to the village during a famine.

His original family name was "Charanyas", due to their ancestors being Charanas or court poets.

Padamsee's father, Hassan Padamsee, was an affluent businessman who owned 10 buildings and also ran a glassware and furniture business.

His mother, Jenabhai Padamsee, was a home-maker.

Akbar Padamsee was one of their eight children; one of his brothers is the actor Alyque Padamsee.

Although rich, the family was not well-educated, and neither of his parents had received much education.

Alyque and his brothers (but not his sisters) were the first to attend school and learn English there; the parents later picked up a smattering of the language from their sons.

Early in life, he started copying images from The Illustrated Weekly of India magazine in his father's accounts books at their store on Chakla Street, in South Mumbai.

He studied at St. Xavier's High School, Fort, and it was here that met his first mentor, his teacher Shirsat, a watercolourist.

He first learned this medium, followed by classes on nudes at Charni Road in preparation for his studies at the Sir J.J. School of Art.

As a result, he was allowed to join the course directly in its third year.

He curated major cultural events and received many distinctions such as the Padma Shri in 2009.

His work is introspective; his "Metascapes" or his "Mirror Images" are abstract images formed from the search for a formal logic.

His topics include landscapes, nudes, heads and he has done portraits created in pencil and charcoal.

The depth which emerges from his oil-based works, emanates from the coloured matter.

His painting Reclining Nude was sold for US$1,426,500 at Sotheby's in New York on 25 March 2011.