Pakala Thirumal Reddy - The artist

Chances are, most of the readers who have reached this column while flipping pages, wouldn’t have heard of its subject this week - the artist PT Reddy. But even among those who are well-versed with the visual arts of modern India, PT Reddy doesn’t enjoy a recall that an artist of his worth absolutely must.

Pakala Thirumal Reddy, popularly known as PT Reddy, was one of the most prominent artists from an era that produced India’s first modernists, who gave direction to modern art of a new independent nation with the zeal and vigour of the country’s freedom fighters, because their journey of discovering India’s artistic identity too had begun before 1947 and almost ran parallel to the career trajectory of the political leaders of the time.

Why I am choosing to write about this artist this week has two reasons - one, it’s high time we knew about him and his art anyhow; and second, a majority of his works at the past few auctions have been sold for more than the highest pre-sale estimates, indicating a slow yet steady interest in his work, which, if given the right push by a museum or a gallery with a big, career retrospective, can truly escalate it to the heights that this artist deserves.

Knowing PT Reddy

Reddy, a versatile artist who made his mark in a variety of mediums, was born in a farming family in Karimnagar district in present-day Telangana in 1915. He studied painting at Bombay’s Sir JJ School of Art. It’s important to note that he was a founder member of the group called Contemporary Painters of Bombay, formed in 1941, six years before the now well-known Progressive Artists’ Group. The other founder members of that group were MT Bhopale, AA Majeed, MY Kulkarni and C Baptista.

While his earlier works were realistic, featuring expressionistic portraits, impressionistic landscapes and still-lifes, he also dabbled in abstraction later on, and dived well into the neo-tantra movement when it gripped the imagination of Indian artists in the late 1960s-early 1970s. His realistic portraits and landscapes as well as tantra paintings continue to remain some of the most captivating works from the vast repertoire of modern Indian art.

Reddy’s versatility can be gleaned from the fact that in his early years as an artist in Bombay, he also worked as an art director in the film industry, with printing presses and commercial studios; later on, he set up a furnishing industry in Hyderabad that he successfully ran between 1947 and 1967, though he returned to being a full-time artist in the late 1950s. Assessing his four-decade long career in a comprehensive book published by the Andhra Pradesh Council of Artists, Hyderabad, 40 Years of PT Reddy, the artist was amazed at the diversity and styles of subjects he had traversed in those decades

During his lifetime, Reddy received several prestigious awards, including those by the Academy of Fine Arts, Calcutta, and the Andhra Pradesh Lalit Kala Akademi.

Reddy’s works have stood the test of time and are as endearing and captivating today as they would have been when first created. His portraits of common people are especially charming for truthfully capturing the simplicity of life. For instance, his figures showing small, itinerant merchants, families huddled together, or groups of women, evoke the innocence of India of 1960s when life of the common folk was far more unostentatious than it is now.

The most defining characteristic of Reddy’s signature was the decidedly Indian vocabulary for modern art. In simple terms, it implies that the strokes, the application of colour, the whole aesthetic was truly modern, in keeping with the globally accepted standards of modern art, yet the image was Indian.

He achieved a new high with his tantra works, in which he not just gave a graphic expression to the philosophy of Tantra, but simultaneously delineated mythological episodes. He called it his quest to balance ‘positive and negative thrust’. In his own words: ‘I worked on the tantric motifs symbolically but without literary overtones. The stress was on the visual representation of the esoteric lore as I understood it.’

His visual exploration of the philosophy was intense as he essayed it through paintings, linocuts and sculptures. Some of his well-known works from this period include Beginning of Sound (etching, 1970), Siva Cult (oil on canvas, 1971), Sree Chakra (intaglio, 1972), Vishnu (watercolour, 1975), Symbol of Saraswati (watercolour, 1979), etc.

However, even while he dabbled in tantra-inspired art, Reddy continued to make figurative works and abstract landscapes. The artist, who lived in Hyderabad for most of his life, passed away in 1996.

Reddy’s Art at Auctions

Though the artist’s rich career behoves his work to be of prime interest in auctions of Indian modern and contemporary art, Reddy’s works are hard to come by in annual sales. But when they do, especially his Tantra works, they are bought at over and above pre-auction estimates. A case in point is his 1984 work, Untitled (Shakti), that was sold at a Sotheby’s auction in London in October 2022 for £1638 (approx. Rs 1.72 lakh at current rates) against an estimate of £800- £1200 (approx. Rs 85,000 – Rs 1.26 lakh). It is a small work, mixed media on card, measuring 21.1 x 16.1 cm. At the same auction, another work with a similar estimate, titled Krishna and Satyabhama on Garuda (1973), fetched £1260 (approx. Rs 1.32 lakh at current rates). This is also a small work, mixed media on paper laid on plywood, measuring 20.4 x 16.8 cm. Both these works hailed from the celebrated Surya Collection of Mrs Ute Rettberg of Germany, a great champion of Indian modern art.

Earlier, in March 2021, at another Sotheby’s auction in New York, an abstract work of Reddy from 1960, Untitled, sold for $13,860 (approx. Rs 11.52 lakh at current rates), against an estimate of $6,000 - $9,000 (approx. Rs 4.98 lakh - Rs 7.48 lakh).

More recently, in March 2023, at a Saffronart auction titled ‘Spring Online: South Asian Modern Art’, Reddy’s Fruit Seller (1963, oil on canvas, 90 x 75 cm), sold for Rs 8.40 lakh against an estimate of Rs 8 lakh – Rs 12 lakh.

All that Reddy now needs is a museum or a top gallery to put its weight behind his art and create his retrospective that travels top art destinations within India and abroad. His art would have then found a height in the edifice of Indian modern art that it so truly deserves.

(The writer is a New Delhi-based arts journalist)