1
Sunday 10 July 2016 The Sunday Telegraph MS Getting there Cox & Kings (020 3642 0861; coxandkings. co.uk) offers a seven-day Taj tour to Delhi and Mumbai from £1,525 per person b&b, twin share. Includes BA flight from London, internal flights, transfers, three nights at the Taj Mahal Hotel in Delhi, and three at the Taj Mahal Palace, Mumbai. Staying there �The Taj Mahal Hotel in Delhi (0091 11 2302 6162; tajhotels. com) is a centrally located five-star property. �The Taj Mahal Palace in Mumbai (0091 22 2202 3366; tajhotels. com) boasts an extensive collection of modern art. Retrospective �You Can’t Please All, an exhibition of work by the late Bhupen Khakhar, left, runs at London’s Tate Modern (tate. org.uk) until November 5. Essentials India T here have been countless such gatherings at Jehangir Art Gallery over the years. This one is the opening of a group exhibition of new sculptures and paintings. In between posing for photographers, artists mingle with friends, family and would-be collectors; flowing freely are tropical juice drinks, in many cases alcoholic; and, given the 35-degree heat, few male guests’ kurtas are buttoned to the top. A public institution founded in 1952, this is Mumbai’s most illustrious art gallery. As its secretary Karthiayani Menon says, “anyone who’s anyone in Indian art has shown at the Jehangir. From SH Raza to Bhupen Khakhar, all the big names have had an exhibition here: it’s a rite of passage”. Khakhar (1934-2003), one of India’s leading artists, is the subject of a retrospective at London’s Tate Modern, 50 years after his debut show at the Jehangir. Though he spent most of his life in nearby Vadodara (previously known as Baroda), Khakhar was born in Mumbai and retained strong links with it throughout. Making one’s way around the city today is still, to a large extent, like entering one of his pictures. Shoe-shiners, rickshaws, movie posters… Khakhar’s great A renaissance for Indian art Bhupen Khakhar’s Death in the Family, below, is one of the paintings currently on show at Tate Modern in London Getty ImaGes; alamy; Chemould PresCott road Gallery ;the estate of BhuPen KhaKhar In the galleries of Mumbai and Delhi, Alastair Smart sees why works from the subcontinent are making waves worldwide RAJASTHAN GUJARAT MAHARASHTRA MADHYA PRADESH INDIA PAKISTAN 200 miles New Delhi Mumbai Vadodara Arabian Sea contribution to Indian art was to introduce to it the language of the street. Painters on the subcontinent had struggled to shake off the twin influences of their own miniature tradition and imported European trends. With Khakhar, Indian art went Pop. Not for nothing was he dubbed India’s David Hockney. Menon shows me around the Jehangir’s lending library, intended to offer locals who seek it a grounding in art history. As for the exhibition schedule, “We’ve got every slot booked until 2023,” she says. Visitors to the Jehangir have always entered beneath its distinctive white and wavy awning but the interior has been renovated and expanded since Khakhar showed here. Four different gallery spaces are now in use, a reflection of Mumbai’s growth as an artistic hub. The Jehangir is in the so-called Kala Ghoda area, in the city’s south, opposite the Prince of Wales Museum (home to a stunning collection of Gupta, Maurya and other ancient Indian sculpture that’s a must-see for even the most fleeting visitor to Mumbai). There has been a lot of buzz about Kala Ghoda: this pedestrian- friendly zone is fast becoming a cultural nerve centre, with boutiques and restaurants popping up on its cobbled lanes. Dozens of smaller art galleries have opened too, with the aim of becoming the next Jehangir. Inspired by similar collaborations in London and New York, Mumbai’s galleries now team up once a month for “Art Night” – staying open until 9.30pm on the second Thursday of every month to get as many folk as possible through doors. A map can be downloaded at asiaartprojects.com/ map and guided tours are available. “It’s a sign of how far the city has come,” says Shireen Gandhy, director of Chemould Prescott Road gallery, the final stop on many tours. “Seeing art has never been a mass pursuit in Mumbai, or in India generally, but times are changing – for the better.” Gandhy dates these changes back to the early 2000s, a time when the Indian art market experienced its first boom and “young, experimental, risk-taking galleries started appearing”. Chemould Prescott Road, a commercial gallery in a vast loft space, was opened by Gandhy’s parents in the Sixties and represented Khakhar until his death. Emerging artists have always been the Gandhys’ priority. Nowadays that means the likes of Jitish Kallat, who is exhibiting on the day I visit: in one set of sculptures, he uses rotis to evoke the different shapes and surfaces of the moon across the lunar month. Khakhar stood out, says Gandhy, for his treatment of gay themes, then a taboo in India. She remembers her mother telling her a story of Khakhar’s painting Two Men in Banaras (now on show at the Tate), when it was shown for the first time at their gallery in 1982. “A Swiss collector turned up one morning and was super interested in buying it, so he pleaded with mum to hold it for him for an hour while he got his finances together. Mum told him to calm down and not worry: because of the subject [a naked gay couple embracing], no Indian would buy it.” For the rest of 2016, the best place in India to see Khakhar’s work is in Delhi, at the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), which is hosting a major display. His unabashedly loud use of colour is what first strikes you – the crimson reds and emerald greens – before you get any sense of the street-corner barbers and other subjects he is actually depicting. A one-time maharaja’s palace, the NGMA is in the heart of New Delhi. Its collection of 15,000 works offers a who’s-who of Indian art of the past two-and-a-half centuries. The story begins in the late 18th century, with the artist-travellers of Europe – Johann Zoffany, William Hodges, Thomas Daniell, et al – who were inspired by India’s exotic landscapes and communities. What’s interesting, as you reach the 20th century rooms, however, is how many of the names are becoming well-known worldwide. Vasudeo Gaitonde was given a retrospective at New York’s Guggenheim in 2014; the same city’s Metropolitan Museum is holding an exhibition by Nasreen Mohamedi. Throw Khakhar at the Tate into the mix and you see a new-found appreciation of India’s recent artists and an increasingly globalised appreciation of the Modernists who made a difference to art history. As for Delhi, the sense is of a city on the up and up. The construction of a metro, followed by its role in hosting the Commonwealth Games in 2010 and the Formula One Grand Prix since 2011, have given it a new cultural confidence. It also boasts the Delhi Art Fair every January. “For years, Delhi was starved of culture,” says Aparajita Jain, director of the gallery, Nature Morte. “It was once simply a political capital, while Mumbai – home of Bollywood – was always India’s arts capital. That gap is closing fast, however.” “As the city has grown wealthier and more cosmopolitan, it has become more artistic, too,” Jain adds. This doesn’t just mean an increase in commercial galleries but in not-for- profit institutions, such as the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, set up in their own name by local millionaires. What Delhi doesn’t have (yet) is a Kala Ghoda equivalent, a specialised art zone. But getting around the city by rickshaw, taxi or metro is no huge trouble. Nature Morte can be found in the city’s centre-south and is one of its most successful galleries. On the day I visit, it is showing images by the photographer Gauri Gill of the Indian diaspora abroad. Are these the people responsible for most of the purchases of Indian art in recent years? “In part,” says Jain, “but we’re also seeing the rise of buyers within India itself, as well as the rest of Asia, as the wealth in the region grows.” India accounted for just $300 million of the $64 billion total of art sales worldwide last year (compared to Britain’s $13.5bn), but that is expected to double by 2020. “Come back in 12 months’ time,” Jain says, “and I’m sure you’ll notice another leap forward.” It’s interesting to think that an artistic tradition which is millennia- old is now transforming by the year. But that’s India for you: a land of endlessly fascinating contradictions. Mumbai’s fashionable Kala Ghoda district, top; the National Gallery of Modern Art in Delhi, above; and the Jehangir Gallery in Mumbai, below right Sunday Telegraph – A renaissance for Indian art, 10 July 2016 For more press information please email [email protected]
