Delhi Art Gallery comes to Mumbai

Delhi Art Gallery (DAG), Delhi’s and the country’s premier gallery dealing in modern art, will open its doors in Mumbai on Saturday with a power-packed show called ‘Mumbai Modern: Progressive Artist Group 1947-2013’ comprising artworks by 13 of India’s best-known and most expensive artists — MF Husain, SH Raza, FN Souza, HA Gade, SK Bakre, KH Ara, VS Gaitonde, Akbar Padamsee, Tyeb Mehta, Krishen Khanna, Ram Kumar, Mohan Samant and Bal Chhabda.

All of these artists are today acknowledged masters, whose artworks fetch top dollars in international auctions. No wonder, says Kishore Singh, DAG’s head of exhibitions and publications, ‘Mumbai Modern’ is a high-value show offering art worth Rs100 crore. Of these, the most expensive are a very large nude by Souza and ‘Blue Torso’ by Tyeb Mehta — Rs 2.5 crore each.

Singh adds, “There are a couple of more paintings priced at Rs2 crore and many, many more above Rs1 crore.”

On show will be several large and distinctive small works by these artists in various mediums, tracing their evolution as artists over the decades and showing a full range of their expression.

Husain, for instance, is represented by his large canvases from his well-known series on the Indian epics, horses, dancing women and Mother Teresa, but there are also smaller watercolours and drawings on paper, besides an interesting series of sketches that the dynamic painter made early in his career in the 1950s, when he worked for a toy firm in Bombay. One sketch of a soldier is signed “Pankhu Singh” and DAG’s Singh conjectures that it was from a series that the artist did for Illustrated Weekly of India in response to contemporary events such as the Kargil war.

But more than Husain, ‘Mumbai Modern’ at DAG will give those interested in modern Indian art a chance to view large, important works by some of the less-famous artists, rarely seen today except in museums — Ara, the painter of luminous still life and stark nudes; Bakre, the only sculptor in the PAG; and Samant, the most awarded in the PAG whose reputation has suffered in recent years.

Like all DAG shows, this one too is a very large one featuring as many as 230 works, spread over four floors of a renovated heritage building in the Kalaghoda area, where the gallery is located.

“We are very near the Jehangir Art Gallery and across the Bombay Art Society, which all these artists frequented. In a sense, this is where it all began,” says Singh, who describes the show as a “retrospective of Indian modernism” itself.

Indeed, if Mumbai is regarded as the cradle of the “modern” in Indian art today, it is thanks to these artists. But for most of them, the association with the city was a short one, since they left it in the 50s and 60s, looking for greener pastures elsewhere.

Raza, Padamsee, Ram Kumar moved to Paris, while Souza, and later Bakre, moved to London and Samant to New York; Husain lived a peripatetic life moving, while Gade moved to Delhi. The show thus represents a significant moment in the life of Mumbai itself.