Sadanand Bakre: Sculptures

Bakre is the lost Progressive.  His personal life and his art were equally tragic. 

 

Tragic in the sense that as a sculptor what works he did with the Progressive Group in the late 1940s before his departure for London have mostly been destroyed.  The clay pieces would not have survived the punishing extremes of the heat and would have simply disintegrated over time. 

 

When he reached London he struggled to find recognition and a gallery and what works he managed to make in bronze and metal would have been very expensive to make and so he had to fund himself.  Without a gallery, he had to rely on his meagre salary as a hospital porter carrying bodies about.  Nevertheless, he did it and had some exhibitions and made some very important and now rare pieces, some of these fortunately, have survived, but only a fraction of what he did, the majority are still lost, presumed destroyed.

 

He had to turn to painting, a more commercial endeavour and with this, he had more success...