Himmat Shah, a fearless modernist who was relentless in his pursuit of excellence

One of India’s foremost sculptors, Himmat Shah, passed away in Jaipur on Sunday. He was 91. A fearless modernist, Shah’s stylised heads in terracotta and bronze created ripples in the art world with their deepened sensitivity. In their abstraction, his heads would bring alive Saint Kabir’s philosophy of the human being as a humble vessel. Though the market took time to respond to his greatness, Shah didn’t let his devotion flag. Completely immersed in his art, memories, and materials would coalesce in Shah’s hands to reflect the fragility and transience of existence. His works embody integrity, experience, culture, and the call of an inner spirit. When one looks at his works, they depict his travel through time – from the past to the present – from tradition to modernity. Inspired by European masters like Henry Moore, Alberto Giacometti, and Constantin Brancusi, Shah combined their insights to gain fresh ground.

Himmat Shah achieves a striking assimilation of ancient and contemporary form in his work.

At a time when everyone was only looking at figurative works to define modernism, Shah, experimented with abstraction and primitivism in sculpture as he believed it was important for the development of modern art. He would say that the radically reductive and non-representational modernism that we find in his sculptures was a reflection of his wider perspective of cultures – Indian and foreign.

Himmat Shah. File.

Born in a Jain business family in Lothal, Gujarat, Shah would describe himself as a rebel who left his home to make his own destiny. With Lothal being a prominent site of the Indus Valley Civilisation, Shah grew up with a sense of history and culture and an urge to decipher the unknown. After spending time at CN Kalaniketan in Ahmedabad and the Sir JJ School of Art, he joined M.S. University, Baroda, where his mentors and teachers, N. S. Bendre, K. G. Subramanyam and Sankho Choudhary provided Shah the space and time to find his idiom. In the 1960s, a French government scholarship allowed him to study at the renowned printmaking studio Atelier 17 in Paris. The experience shaped his worldview.

In 1975, Shah participated in a ceramic camp at Garhi. With its tranquil environment, Garhi was just the right place for Shah. For the next two decades, he experimented with clay and developed a unique vocabulary. Be it the tweaks in slip casting technique or silver paintings, he would say his works emerged out of his deep experiences, without pressures of patrons or the market. “Solitude was my constant companion,” he once reflected in a conversation with The Hindu.

While the years at Garhi added a meditative texture to his works, the market woke up to him only when he switched to bronze heads in the 1980s. He continued to learn and grow. Not satisfied with the texture of bronze created in Indian foundries, he found ways to travel to London to understand how to add smoothness to the strength of bronze while creating the bones of a sculpture.

Face in bronze. File.
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Despite age catching up with him, Shah’s spirit for experimentation didn’t diminish as he continued to shape his experiences at his Jaipur studio until the very end. He would say the best form of expression arises out of the deepest devotion.

In his passing, Indian contemporary art has lost a true master of form and material who combined the modern and the spiritual like no other.

The writer is a seasoned art critic.