Fall depicts a construction worker who has plunged from bamboo scaffolding. Behind the figure stands an incomplete building paneled with beautiful tiles, whose design the artist borrowed from a Mughal painting. Like many of Patwardhan’s paintings since the 1980s, Fall is suffused with a representational objectivity that reconstructs from memory a place he has observed in the city of Mumbai. The artist painted the scene during a time when large tracts of the city were being redeveloped, as the cloth mills that made Mumbai an industrial powerhouse were shutting down and scores of laborers were made redundant. Fall has a distinctly fragmentary narrative quality that heightens the isolation and loneliness of the industrial worker. To Patwardhan, the painting reflects "a kind of fall from grace" of the unprotected working class and the breakdown of the social fabric of the city against a seemingly attractive landscape of a growing industrial suburb.
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the artist (1998–2000; sold in 2000 through Sundaram Tagore Gallery, New York to Akhoury); Virginia and Ravi Akhoury, Florham Park, N.J. (2000–23; their gift to MMA)
London. Tate Modern. "Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis," February 1–April 29, 2001, unnumbered cat. (p. 23; lent by Virginia and Ravi Akhoury).
New Brunswick. Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. "India: Contemporary Art from Northeastern Private Collections," April 7–July 31, 2002, no. 66 (as "The Fall," lent by Ravi and Virginia Akhoury).
IVAM Institut Valencia d'Art Modern. "India Moderna," December 11, 2008–February 15, 2009, unnumbered cat. (p. 234; dated 1988; lent by Ravi and Virginia Akhoury).
Hempstead, N.Y. Hofstra University Museum. "Indian Art After Independence: Selected Works from the Collections of Virginia & Ravi Akhoury and Shelley & Donald Rubin," October 13–December 18, 2009, unnum. brochure (as "The Fall," lent by Virginia and Ravi Akhoury).
New York. Rubin Museum of Art. "Modernist Art from India: Radical Terrain," November 16, 2012–April 29, 2013, no catalogue.
Umesh Gaur and Marcella Sirhandi. "Contemporary Indian Art in Private American Collections." Arts of Asia 32 (July–August 2002), pp. 95–96, fig. 7 (color).
Marcella C. Sirhandi inIndia: Contemporary Art from Northeastern Private Collections. Ed. Jeffrey Wechsler and Umesh Gaur. Exh. cat., Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. New Brunswick, 2002, p. 85, no. 66, ill. (color).
Geeta Kapur and Ashish Rajadhyaksha. "Visual Culture in an Indian Metropolis." Towards a New Art History: Studies In Indian Art (Essays Presented in Honour of Prof. Raton Parimoo). Ed. Shivaji K Panikkar et al. New Delhi, 2003, p. 76, colorpl. 2.
Ranjit Hoskote. Sudhir Patwardhan: The Complicit Observer. Mumbai, [2005?], pp. 31–32, 203, ill. (color) and ill. pp. 122–23 (color, detail and overall).
Holland Cotter. "South Asia Through Modernist Binoculars." New York Times (December 28, 2012), p. C33, ill.
Dr. Kavita Singh. "Sudhir Patwardhan: A Painter’s X-Ray of Indian Society." Artistic Narration 10 (December 2019), pp. 113–14, colorpl. 3.
Gieve Patel inMoving Focus, India: New Perspectives on Modern and Contemporary Art. Ed. Mortimer Chatterjee. Woodbridge, Suffolk, U.K., 2022, vol. 1 ill. p. 134 (color); vol. 2, p. 474, ill. (color),.
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