Published on April 4, 2026
Fondly remembered as the “thinker’s artist,” Akbar Padamsee was one of the pioneers and stalwarts of Indian modern art. He was not just a prolific painter with a highly refined aesthetic – his impressive oeuvre also covered a range of different interests, including photography, sculpture, and film. The interdisciplinary modern Indian artist was the most experimental among the progressives, known for his tendencies of pushing the boundaries. In a huge loss to the art world, Akbar Padamsee passed away on January 6, 2020, in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India.
Born in 1928 into a traditional Khoja Muslim family hailing from Gujarat, Akbar Padamsee took a strong liking to art from his childhood. Hailing from a privileged family, Padamsee’s father was an affluent businessman who ran a glassware and furniture business. As a child, Padamsee would copy images from ‘The Illustrated Weekly of India’ magazine in his father’s accounts books at their store on Chakla Street, in South Mumbai. His fondness for art grew through the photographs of gods and goddesses his grandmother shared with him, and the antique furniture and flower vases that adorned his home.
Padamsee’s first mentor was his schoolteacher, Shirsat, a watercolourist. He learned the medium of watercolour from his mentor, which was followed nudes. With his passion for art only growing with time, Padamsee joined the Sir J.J. School of Art in 1948 with considerable support from his family.
While he was still a student in his early 20s, Akbar Padamsee became involved with the Progressive Artists’ Group (PAG) in Bombay, which was formed in 1947 by F.N. Souza, S. H. Raza, and M. F. Husain. Though not a formal member, he was the youngest associate of the PAG and formed lifelong friendships with its members. The group changed the landscape of Indian modern art forever Indian art styles with modernist styles.
The PAG eventually dispersed, with Souza making his career in London, and Raza in Paris. It was Raza’s move that prompted Padamsee to move to the French capital to study painting. Raza, Souza, and Padamsee became the trio of modern Indian artists whose canvases were influenced -garde sensibilities. It was in Paris that Padamsee developed his own artistic language.
Working from surrealist artist Stanley Hayter’s studio in Paris, ‘Atelier 17’, an experimental workshop for graphic art, Padamsee studied the works of western masters such as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, which left an impression on his art. His first solo show was held in Paris in 1952 at Galerie Saint Placide. He was recognized for his work while he was in Paris, and in 1952, his painting, ‘Woman with Bird’, won him a prestigious prize judged and poet André Breton.
Padamsee visited India to present his first solo in Mumbai in 1954. The show featured the artist’s cityscapes, heads, and nudes, and a controversial set of works titled ‘Lovers No. 1’ and ‘Lovers No. 2’. Accused of obscenity, the artist was taken to court, and though he won the court case which went on for almost a year, the incident left him bitter. Padamsee returned to Paris, and while he kept frequenting India over the years, he moved back to his motherland only in the late ‘60s.
Akbar Padamsee’s figurative artworks and portraits gave way to his much-admired Grey series. The interplay of light and shadow on his canvases in the mid ‘50s eventually led to a complete purge of colours from his palette of the decade, resulting in the creation of some massive monochromes. The panoramic grey paintings were dense landscapes with no linear narrative and filled with architectural forms. Colours were suffused for Padamsee, who would say, “It’s far more exciting for me as a painter to work in grey or sepia. The brush can move freely from figure to ground, and this interaction offers me immense formal possibilities.”
Arguably featuring some of Padamsee’s finest works like ‘Greek Landscape’, ‘Reclining Nude’, ‘Juhu’, and ‘Cityscape’, the paintings from this series have made for some huge auction house sales. ‘Greek Landscape’ was auctioned for a whopping Rs 19.19 crore at a Saffronart auction in 2016.
Akbar Padamsee is fondly remembered as an intellectual artist, with his great love for reading and philosophy seeping into his art as well. Padamsee travelled to North America on a Rockefeller scholarship, and this was where his paintings took on a more experimental character – his cubist architectural forms gave way to earthy hues with a sensory semblance.
In his 40s, Padamsee took lessons in Sanskrit in Mumbai, and verses from the Gita, Vedas, and the Upanishads became a part of his life. This reflected in his Metascapes in the ‘70s, which brought together landscapes and cityscapes. Padamsee said that the idea of using the sun and moon in his Metascapes originated when he was reading the ‘Abhijnanashakuntalam’ . The concept of the simultaneous presence of both the celestial bodies was drawn from the play, which is one of Kalidasa’s most well-known works. “I was exploring adding poetic meaning to create new forms from nature,” Padamsee was quoted .
Akbar Padamsee ventured into literature, mathematics, photography, critical theory, psychoanalysis, and sculpture, and also made his own short abstract
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