Designer genius Dashrath Patel's work to be on display this November

Kolkata Centre for Creativity (KCC), the city's first private museum-cum-'multi-dimensional interactive art space', will open its doors on November 21 with a large exhibition of the works of the Dashrath Patel. Curated by architect Pinakin Patel, the late artist's friend, acolyte and the one to whom he bequeathed his works, the exhibition at Emami Art in Kolkata Centre for Creativity is called School, foregrounding his near-20-year stint as the first secretary of the National Institute of Delhi (NID), where he trained an entire generation of designers and laid the template for a design education and practice that was responsive to Indian needs.

But there was so much more to Patel, and School will present a snapshot of his many artistic explorations – as a sculptor, designer, painter, ceramicist, collage-maker, and photographer, to name the most prominent. Patel, who died in 2010 at the age of 83, seemed to have been a protean, free-spirited artistic genius who experimented with many media, often with distinction. "Ultimately, all creativities are linked, Dashrath used to say," says Pinakin.

The trajectory of Dashrath's formal artistic career took shape under Debi Prasad Roy Chowdhry at Madras's Government College of Art, where he made friends with Harindranath Chattopadhyay, poet, actor, politician (also Sarojini Naidu's brother) and Chandralekha, the dancer. Later, he moved to Bombay where he was at the Bhulabhai Desai Institute at the same time as Tyeb Mehta, MF Husain and VS Gaitonde, marquee names in Indian art today. Sometime later, he was in Paris, on a scholarship to Ecole De Beaux Arts, when Henri Cartier Bresson walked into one of his exhibitions and exhorted him to pick up the camera. Dashrath went on to intern with the legendary French photographer, churning out an entire body of work that will be exhibited at School.

"Dashrath was fortunate in having a whole lot of mediums walk into his life and expand his language. Later, when he was at NID, almost the entire world was involved – Charles Eames, Louis Kahn, George Nakashima, Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage," says Pinakin.

There's more – in 1957, he went to Prague to study industrial ceramics where he brought a characteristic playfulness to his handiwork, creating both art works and functional designs that are said to be pioneering innovations.

Then there are the collages – juxtapositions of flat coloured paper – and line drawings, which, says Pinakin, Dashrath practised every day, believing them as crucial as riyaaz to a singer. "He described his drawings by saying, 'my line is a dot that goes for a walk," says Pinakin. There are also his multi-media feats of exhibition design for several large international fairs in New Delhi, Paris, New York and Moscow, and products in lacquer and leather created in collaboration, particularly at the Sewapuri near Varanasi, where he worked for a time after NID.       

The show will have key works exemplifying each of these practices that have been sourced from the Dashrath Patel Museum in Alibaug, set up by Pinakin and Dashrath a year before his death. "I first met Dashrath around 2000 because I wanted to buy his work," says Pinakin, who himself is a self-taught architect and designer. "But he refused. He later came to live with us in Alibaug. He offered to leave his works to me but I did want that. So a foundation was set up to protect and manage his legacy. The museum was completed about two years before his death and he spent his last months among his works, interacting with visitors." This is the first time these will be travelling out of Alibaug.

For strangely, despite all these and more claims to general recognition – Dashrath was the first designer to get a Padma Shri in 1980, a Padma Bhushan, conferred posthumously, and a retrospective show at the National Gallery of Modern during his lifetime, the Indian art world seems to have forgotten Dashrath. "His work was more about evolution; the journey was more important to him. I don't want to be iconified in this bindus, as he once said about Raza," says Pinakin. It is this very reluctance to be pinned down in his lifetime that has meant recognition, and a market has been slow coming his way. Hopefully, this show will help change that somewhat.