A rainy evening, quite unusual for the spring in Delhi, but so delightful as one carefully navigates those Bombax flowers. As one enters art Art Alive Gallery, one feels the essence of the spring being carried inside. Maïté Delteil, the 86-year-old artist, welcomes with the warmest smile. The essence of spring effortlessly translates to what is being displayed on the walls, cleverly titled “The Yellow Room”. As one looks around, one observes the familiarity of the hues, yet somehow realises how it is missed in contemporary art. Single women, naked women, contemplative women, maternal women, women who are friends and aren't, Delteil has got them all against charming pinks, yellows and greens. They are nonchalant, at times melancholic in their boudoirs.
Born in 1933 and brought up in the French countryside, Delteil was educated at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris. She then received a fellowship from the Government of France to study in Spain and Greece. Delteil has worked under the painter Roger Chapelain-Midy and the engraver Robert Cami. In 1963, she married Indian painter Sakti Burman, who studied in Beaux-Arts as well, under a scholarship. “In the 50s, when I was in school, my way of working was very classical, which was not fashionable. The colours I used were also very different. In India now it has become ‘the concept’. Everybody is working with a concept. I have never done that, I don’t even now. Your work reflects you and the times. I cannot change myself,” says Delteil.
It was last year that art-curator Sunaina Anand visited Delteil’s country home studio in Anthe, France, where she discovered these paintings. “These small, intimate works reveal a deep influence of the European masters in her rendering of her own environment, the French countryside, where she spent a major part of her childhood,” says Anand.
So why does this collection have women alone? “At the end of 1960s, I was mainly working in Japan. Looking into these paintings, I realised I was very much concerned with the search of vibrant colours simply applied, as Matisse was doing. I was also trying to depict intimate interiors to present models in gentle boudoirs, in a contemplative appearance, more than in a banal sentimental vision. At that time, I was impressed by artists like Berthe Morisot, Edward Vuillard or Pierre Bonnard,” adds Delteil. “I particularly find youngsters being attracted to these paintings. I could see that all these women were not sad but contemplative. They are without movement,” she says. There is a sense of freedom, of unbecoming of the conventional woman one perceives in Delteil’s paintings. The immediate point of departure, as arts writer Anushka Rajendran has pointed out, is “one that Virginia Woolf would have approved of; women in rooms of their own, occasionally with each other but always without a man in sight.”
One feels the use of colourful vases, flowers, the peek into the balcony behind, the umbrellas, the mirrors, the cushions and curtains as somewhat aiding this contemplation, but never replacing anything. Even though nudity is a predominant motif in this collection, one is compelled to acknowledge the privacy of the sexuality of its subjects.
This exhibition of paintings from the 1960s follows a show of Maïté Delteil’s drawings from the 1970s, which was curated by Ranjit Hoskote in Mumbai in December 2018. The full collection of The Yellow Room series is on display at Art Alive Gallery, New Delhi, till 15th April.
