Lain Singh Bangdel

(1919-2002)

Kathmandu Valley

Footnotes

Provenance
Property from the Collection of the Bangdel-Shakya Estate, Virginia, USA.

Published
Lain Singh Bangdel: Mountains and Migration, Bonhams, London, November 2023.

A twentieth century polymath, Bangdel became Nepal's preeminent modern artist, as well as acclaimed novelist, art historian, preservationist, and academic who played a pivotal role in shaping the history of art in South Asia. Whilst he was born in Darjeeling, India to a family from Eastern Nepal, he grew up in Bengal, where his family had migrated to find work. In 1939, he attended the Government College of Art & Craft in Calcutta, and despite dreaming of his homeland and the mountain range that enveloped it his early works were focussed on the architecture of Calcutta. He lived in Calcutta for a decade before departing for the United Kingdom and France. He imbibed the art scene and what it offered and continued to experiment with diverse subjects, before moving to Kathmandu in 1961.

Kathmandu Valley was painted in the early 1970s, shortly after Bangdel's return from the United States, where he had been a Fulbright Scholar from 1968-69. It was here that he was impacted by the works of abstract expressionists like Philip Guston, Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline. His works subsequently evolved and his abstract style, the roots of which can be traced to Calcutta and Europe, became bolder. In Kathmandu Valley Bangdel turns his attention from the sublime, staggering peaks of the Himalayas to the rolling, lush environs of the Kathmandu Valley. He uses passages of gold, ochre, and emerald—streaked with black—to carve out a tranquil, embracing landscape outside of Nepal's bustling capital, Kathmandu. Bangdel creates a gentle sense of dimension with this land, enough to evoke the terraced farming in the hills and valleys of Nepal that enables the region's agricultural production. Painted over a decade after Moon over Kathmandu (1962), this work utilizes the fragmented style Bangdel once deployed to render metropolitan spaces, exchanging the urban subject for pastoral tranquillity.