The golden eggs matter more than the goose

I’ve been to soooo many fairs … Paris, London, Berlin. But, let me tell you this is where the money is, babe”. I overheard the sleek, young gallerist from New Delhi with a slight American twang spicing up her conventy English tell another gallery owner at the recent India Art Summit in New Delhi.

The lady wasn’t the only one: many of the gallerists looked liked cats that had licked a lot of cream — even those from international galleries who found enthusiastic buyers for their works of art.

Business was good: Rs78 crores, far more than anticipated. Big ticket collectors, museumwallahs and gallery owners from Europe and North America, not to speak of gallery owners from the rest of India had made it a point to come this time. And, hats off to the young and dynamic Neha Kirpal for pulling off this coup: the art fair was cogently organised and gave contemporary Indian art, a wonderful, vibrant platform.

You only have to compare the two melas (if I may stretch things a bit and describe the India Art Summit and the Jaipur Literature Festival as melas) to appreciate Ms Kirpal’s efforts. The two are fairly new and growing exponentially. However, Jaipur was far more chaotic this year, with a few sessions that didn’t really get anywhere, Delhi was far better organised. More important, it had a buzz: many put their money where their mouths were.

But, alas, the buzz these days ends up being just about prices. A large number of international galleries had set up shop and were more interested in selling their wares in Shining India with its fattening middle class than they were in picking up artists from here.

There was also a lot of collateral art activity with the Summit, including the opening of the Kiran Nadar Museum of Modern Art and the re-launch of the renovated and completely metamorphosed Delhi Art Gallery, exhibiting its impressive collection of the Progressives.

However, everywhere one went the chatter was just about the art mart: who was going up and who was going down. The artist, it seems, is being left out of the equation. It was if the golden goose no longer mattered; the golden eggs it laid were all that did.  Moreover, much of the discourse about art is replete with theorising. Very little of the artist and his life comes through.

So, it was with great pleasure that I saw some of the photographs of artists that painter and collector Manisha Gera Baswani has been taking over the past eight years. Like a fly on the wall, she has been hanging around with her camera, catching the artists off-guard or completely immersed in their work. She has caught them offstage, with the masks off.

Normally Mithu Sen, the gregarious artist who just won the Rs10 lakh Skoda prize for Indian contemporary art, has an animated face. But in Baswani’s photograph her face, also reflected on the surface of a glass as a double image; she appears pensive, almost vulnerable.

Particularly evocative is the image of Neelima Sheikh, shown tenderly holding her grandchild in her arms while she walks about the venue of the Summit, with rolled canvases of her work on the floor.

Happily, art historian and curator Yashodhara Dalmia has in her new book, Journey. Four Generations of Indian Artists in their Own Words, given us a glimpse into the thoughts, lives and creative process of thirty artists.

Time to put the painter back in the picture.