The lean and spare Natvar Bhavsar is an antithesis to his paintings. Where they are huge and filled with possibilities and murmurings, he is quietly elegant; where they explode with colour, he prefers white; where they manifest energy, he is unobtrusively contained. In New York, Bhavsar is a celebrity in art circles - his works are in the collections of the Met, the Guggenheim, the Whitney, and the Museum of Long Island in New York, in museums in Philadelphia, Boston and Sydney, in universities, large corporations, media houses and with important individual collectors - so if he is little known in his home country, blame it on galleries and collectors here. His earliest exhibition was at the iconic Max Hutchinson gallery in SoHo, of which art district Bhavsar was among the earliest residents, and one of his most celebrated exhibitions was at the Jewish Museum in New York, considered, at the time, more important than even the Museum of Modern Art.
Having chatted with Bhavsar on a few occasions, it was a delight to be invited to his SoHo studio-residence where an elevator takes you straight to a wall with an amazing work stretched across its entire width. Nor is that the only large work on display. Bhavsar's living areas consist of light-filled spaces where the walls are high and wide. Their amazing perspective and use of colour are the two things that immediately grab your attention. I am not absolutely sure, but his 1969 Theer-a-Theer, at 360 inches (or 30 ft) is likely his largest work, and it is often the immensity of his canvases you notice first. As for his colours, Bhavsar works with dry pigments - "My paintings cost a lot of money to create," he tells me, "because of the nature of the material used," - that he dusts on to his canvases, famously using as many as 80 layers with the use of a fixer. This creates an interesting texture, and even decades after a canvas has been completed, it continues to retain its freshness.
In the six decades since he came to the US, Bhavsar has achieved incredible success, beginning almost at the start of his career. As an artist working in design in Ahmedabad, Bhavsar decided to travel to America to study further. A figurative artist, he was caught - and enchanted - by the maelstrom of abstract expressionism that had gripped America in the Sixties, and was inspired by his meetings with Alexander Calder and Mark Rothko, the latter becoming a friend and often ending up at Bhavsar's studio "to drink cheap wine". Sixties America was probably its most exciting period for artists from all streams - and somewhat difficult for Indian artists arriving from Europe, such as F N Souza and Avinash Chandra - but Bhavsar was caught up in its headiness, switching from the figurative to the abstract, contributing to and becoming one of the leading figures of colour field painting.
Bhavsar's contribution to American abstraction has been immense, especially since he has continued to enjoy a unique perspective on the genre that derives at least partly from his Indian roots, their titles evocative of the spirit of India. It is this quality that fascinates his critics, among them American art historian Irving Sandler who likens it to music: "What is the content of Bhavsar's painting? To absorb viewers, just as great music does listeners", going on to stress that for the artist "the essence of art is essentially biological". Bhavsar's work has been commented on by a vast number of art writers, all of whom find that "the nationality of the artist, the spirit of the place is imprinted on his work". Time the nation discovered him, then?
Kishore Singh is a Delhi-based writer and art critic. These views are personal and do not reflect those of the organisation with which he is associated
