V S Gaitonde

Gaitonde was born in Nagpur around 1924 to Goan parents. He took his diploma at the Sir J J School of Art in 1948, and in 1950 he was invited to join the Progressive Artists’ Group, which was then three years old.

He did not paint like the others. Where Husain and Souza painted people, Gaitonde moved toward canvases with no subject at all, only colour and surface. He disliked the word abstract and called the work non-objective. Writers often link it to calligraphy and to Zen Buddhism, which interested him all his life.

He won first prize at the Young Asian Artists Exhibition in Tokyo in 1957, held a Rockefeller fellowship in the United States in 1964 and 1965, and had a solo show in New York in 1965. He received the Padma Shri in 1971.

He later moved to Delhi and lived and worked in Nizamuddin East. He died in 2001, largely out of view. The correction came in 2014, when the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum in New York opened Painting as Process, Painting as Life, more than 40 paintings and works on paper. It was his first retrospective, and in 2015 it travelled to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice.