A day at the museums

My piece for India Today magazine:

Connoisseurs can once again visit the National Museum and the National Gallery of Modern Art in Delhi to gaze at some of India’s most iconic artefacts and works of art.
 

Visitors at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Delhi admire Amrita Sher-Gil’s painting 'Young Girls'

The National Museum New Delhi had never felt this intimate. I was in the Miniature Gallery when a robust male voice began to sing loudly: “Tu hi pyaar, tu hi chaahat, tu hi aashiqui hai”. I had been admiring Radha and Krishna admiring their own reflection in a mirror: a pre-digital couplefie aided by an attendant, and the painter. Now the 1640 Mewar miniature seemed illuminated by the security guard’s rendition of the song from Mahesh Bhatt’s 1990 romantic superhit, Aashiqui.

It was 3 pm on the first Sunday after India’s premier museum reopened on November 10, but only 23 ticketed visitors before me had entered the grand old building on New Delhi’s Janpath. Inaugurated in 1960, the museum complex is being revamped since 2017, and I have often found the upper floors closed for renovation.

On Sunday, you could again climb the grand staircase to the second floor, but the only gallery open was ‘Tribal Lifestyle of North East India’: unreconstructed old-style anthropology running rampant, though there are some striking Monpa and Naga masks and headdresses. Sections of the open corridor display were cordoned off, but visitors might enjoy the 10th century South Indian stone sculptures of zodiac signs. On the first floor, I followed two reluctant men into the Ajanta Paintings gallery at a guard’s urging, but the lights were all off. Tanjore Paintings, too, was closed. But you could visit Central Asian Antiquities, Maritime Heritage and the Coins Gallery, which I have always thought an attractively condensed history of South Asia. Watch out for the 3rd-5th century CE Gupta emperors, who chose this most public canvas to enshrine themselves in the popular imagination as ‘Rhinoceros-slayer’, ‘Swordsman’ and my favourite, ‘Lyrist’: the conqueror Samudragupta proclaiming his mastery of the veena. Post-demonetisation currency isn’t a patch on Gupta coinage.

On the ground floor, I paid a visit to the Harappan Dancing Girl, tiny and insouciant as ever, before ambling into the sculptures, where a stunning buffalo-headed female figure caught my eye. “Vrishanana Yogini. Pratihara, 10th -11th cent. A.D. Lokhari, Distt. Banda, Uttar Pradesh,” said the label. It was only later that the internet told me this was one of the museum’s most treasured new acquisitions. Illegally trafficked out of an Uttar Pradesh temple, this example of the powerful female-centric Yogini cult was returned to the Indian embassy in Paris in 2008 by the widow of a French collector and acquired by the museum in 2013, under the then director general, Venu V. If only our curators understood: this is the story that should be on the plaque. The nation would want to know.

“Sixteen of the museum’s 27 galleries are accessible in this first phase of reopening,” the museum’s education officer Rige Shiba wrote in an email. Many new arrangements are in place: the ticket counter is now outside the entry gate to the complex, and temperature checks, sanitisation and security screening take place before you walk in. Following the ministry of culture’s guidelines for post-Covid reopening, free volunteer-led tours are currently suspended. So is one of the museum’s innovations for visually-disabled visitors: touch tours of the 22-item Anubhav gallery. Audio guides are also out for the moment “unless these can be disinfected after every single use”.

Curatorial tours are also suspended at the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), where daily ticketed visitors are down from 250-500 in pre-Covid times to about 70. The gallery is discouraging group visits, with curators offering customised digital walkthroughs instead. There’s also a free virtual tour. But on Sunday evening, having scurried through November rain, I could not have found happier shelter than the beauteous airy interiors of the NGMA. Anupam Sud’s Ceremony of Unmasking triptych made me smile at its new relevance. Bhupen Khakhar’s miniature-inspired Hamam Khana (1982) seemed prescient about our strange faux-sanitised times: a naked woman standing rigidly to attention in a bare, controlled enclosure, as if waiting to be allowed to bathe.

I took the empty elevator upstairs, discovering the Mexican mural-like joys of Pran Nath Mago’s Rice Planters (1952), before arriving at his Delhi Shilpi Chakra collective contemporary, the underrated modernist B.C. Sanyal (1901-2003). I stood forever in front of Sanyal’s stunning At the Nizamuddin Fair and his seductively lungi-clad self-portrait, Old Man and the Bird. “Now that’s the old man of love to become,” a friend texted back.

A masked boy and girl stopped at an M.F. Husain. “Yeh Picasso hain (this is a Picasso),” the boy said. “Kehte hain inki chai bhi gir jaati thi, toh painting ban jaati thi (they say if he dropped his tea, it would also become a painting).” They held hands tightly. The world fell away.
 

Published in India Today magazine, 20 Nov 2020

Misadventurers in the Museum: Nasreen Mohamedi, Amrita Shergil and Seven Contemporaries

An art review, published in Open magazine.

The women whose imaginations currently fill Delhi’s Kiran Nadar Museum of Art are many things, their work an inventory of artistic possibility.

The ongoing show at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, located, interestingly, in a South Delhi mall, is a tripartite mega-exhibition of the work of several accomplished women artists from India. The first part, ‘A View to Infinity’, is the largest ever retrospective of the works of Nasreen Mohamedi; the second, ‘The Self in Making’, is devoted to the self-portraits of Amrita Sher-Gil; and the third, ‘Seven Contemporaries’, contains work by seven women artists working today.

Collectively named ‘Difficult Loves’ after a collection of short stories by the Italian writer Italo Calvino, the exhibition, in the words of curator Roobina Karode, ‘proposes to talk about adventures, misadventures, complex relationships with objects, subjects, desires and life itself, about trials and errors in the individual artistic journeys of these nine participating artists.’ By bringing together this immensely varied work, the KNMA show makes it impossible for anyone to suggest ever again that the category ‘women artists’ is somehow a self-explanatory one.

Nasreen Mohamedi died of a rare neurological disorder in 1990 at the age of 53. Over the last decade, she has come to be recognised as one of the most accomplished Indian practitioners of non-figurative art. The KNMA show brings together her delicate drawings, most in ink and graphite, with her black-and-white photographs, which were never exhibited in her lifetime.

Though her early work does have a few figurative images—a woman in a sari, two men sitting—an impulse towards minimalism already exists. The two men, for instance, are drawn in fractured outline—the barest essential strokes needed to describe the form of the human body. Pale washes of colour combined with thin lines hint at trees and houses and electricity wires, or a handcart resting under a tree. Another phase of early work uses repeated brushstrokes a la impressionism to create swatches of colour that suggest—rather than try to recreate—sun and sea and sand. But Mohamedi’s minimalist instincts soon led her in the direction of greater abstraction.

One of her perennial concerns and interests as an artist seems to have been the patterns inherent in nature. Scattered notes from her diary reveal a mind that was often provoked by the effortless beauty of the natural world to question the very purpose of art. ‘To make an effort to do anything seems so futile. Everything in nature is so perfect,’ she writes, and later: ‘I feel so empty and useless. That light on the beach. Those zigzag designs that waves leave on the sands.’

Happily for us, Mohamedi moved on from these feelings of artistic paralysis to producing art that echoed nature. A lot of her work might be thought of as drawing something essential out of the natural and making it visible on paper. Her photographs show how she was drawn to the magic of natural design: the ripples on the surface of the sea and the corresponding ones on sand, the eclipsed moon. Whether in these photographs, or those of manmade creations—the architecture of Fatehpur Sikri, the warp and weft of threads in the weaving of cloth—Mohamedi distils the essence of form.

In another meditation in her diaries, Mohamedi writes, ‘nature disposes itself in rhythm, and only in rhythm is one able to escape time.’ There is in this an echo of another voice—avant garde American filmmaker Maya Deren (1917-61). Deren’s rather strange short film Ritual in Transfigured Time(1946) creates the feeling of watching a dream. This effect of dream time is created through repetition. The rhythmic movement of a woman winding wool, repeated over and over again, produces an alternative to the linear progression of time that film usually seeks to recreate, especially through techniques of continuity editing. Mohamedi’s later art seems to make a similar use of repetition to transcend linearity.

The line remained crucial throughout her work, but her use of it changed drastically. The line ceased to be a way to create a bounded form, to describe a body or a tree. Repeated over and over again, it became something purer, a thing in and of itself. The meshing of lines, their careful placing over each other or at regular distances, creates a sense of depth.

Another aspect of Mohamedi’s relationship with time emerges from another quote on the wall: ‘Waiting is a part of intense living’. This thought seems of a piece with the recreation of her workplace within the museum: the room is dimly lit, except for a low-hanging lamp that illuminates a low white table upon which is placed a blank sheet of paper, a ruler, and a few seashells. From a small music system in the corner comes the magisterial voice of Bhimsen Joshi, to the accompaniment of which Mohamedi apparently often worked late into the night.

Amrita Sher-Gil is among India’s most iconic artists, certainly among the most popularly loved. Her work is starkly opposed to Mohamedi’s in many ways—figurative, rich in colour, keen on symbolism. The most crucial difference seems to be that where Mohamedi turned ever outward, Sher-Gil’s artistic quest, right from her youth, led her inward, shining a light upon her family, her relationships, her connection to India, and, most obviously, herself.

Sher-Gil was born in 1913 in Budapest to a Sikh aristocrat called Umrao Singh Shergil and a Hungarian opera singer called Marie Antoinette Gottesmann. She spent a lot of her childhood in Hungary, then some years in Shimla before going to Paris to train as a painter. In 1934, she was overcome by a longing to return to India, and returned to the country, travelling to see historic centres of Indian art like Ajanta and settling in her father’s family home in Saraya, Gorakhpur.

Sher-Gil’s art is said to have changed in accordance with this geographical shift, from the more European work she did in her early years, to the portraits of rural Indian women she did after 1934, which have been seen as profoundly influenced by Abanindranath and Rabindranath Tagore. While in Saraya, Sher-Gil wrote to a friend: ‘I can only paint in India. Europe belongs to Picasso, Matisse, Braque... India belongs only to me.’ But did Amrita belong only to India?

With its focus on her self-portraits, the show at KNMA offers us a glimpse of the constant, lifelong tussle in which Sher-Gil’s Western and Indian selves were engaged.

In some pencil sketches she did as early as 1927, she appears stocky and dense, her arms and torso chunky. In one of these images, a deliberate curl of hair is placed strategically in the centre of her forehead, calling to mind the Henry Longfellow rhyme: ‘There was a little girl/ Who had a little curl,/ Right in the middle of her forehead./ When she was good,/ She was very good indeed,/ But when she was bad she was horrid.’ Scrawled in dark pencil in the margin of another are the words ‘Prostitutes of the Gods... so-called... Devadasis.’

Placed alongside Sher-Gil’s own images of herself are a series of pictures of her taken between 1927 and 1934 by her father Umrao Singh, himself an immensely talented photographer. In the first, Amrita grins self-consciously out at us, that same curl in the centre of her forehead, deliberately crafted, forced into place. Her attire varies through the series. Dressed in a sari, she sometimes has her head covered or wears a bindi. Elsewhere, she is wearing a long white frock, her hair open.

This desire to experiment with her identity, to perform different versions of the self, emerges just as strongly in her more mature work, best represented by two images from Vivan Sundaram’s digital photo-montage series, ‘Re-take of Amrita’, also at KNMA. Sundaram, Sher-Gil’s nephew, has created several composite frames in which different images of the artist are juxtaposed, accentuating her shifting relationship with East and West.

In one, a photographic Amrita in a collared polka-dotted dress and what looks like a beret—these are the Paris years—sits next to a painted Amrita, in the same pose but now wearing a heavy necklace and a turban on her head, making her look like an ‘Eastern’ figure out of some Delacroix painting. In another, Sundaram overlays Sher-Gil’s Self as Tahitian, in which she posed in the nude in the post-impressionist style of Paul Gauguin’s Tahitian women, with a smiling pin-up-style photograph of her in swimming costume.

The work on view under ‘Seven Contemporaries’ seems to revisit some of the concerns of Sher-Gil and Mohamedi. Bharti Kher’s massive triptych is a characteristic agglomeration of bindis—thousands of them stuck onto a black surface in patterns that create the sense of a topographical map. But instead of the dull browns and greens of most maps, here we have a new continent, rich and strange. The brilliant red of bindis evokes blood andsindoor and every aspect of female fertility; the black background appears as rivulets flowing through the mouth of some great river.

Sheela Gowda’s three pieces speak to domesticity and the experience of enclosure. In Margins, dismantled door frames stretch out towards the sky rather than bounding space. In Viewfinder, two window frames with meshes and iron grills press down on the possibilities of seeing. In the disturbing Like a Bird, ropes of hair are strung across a small space. Weighted down with metal forms, they bring to mind the arcs traced by a bird trapped inside a room: now frantic, now weary.

Anita Dube’s Intimations of Mortality (1997) is apt punctuation to all three shows. A concentration of enamelled ceramic eyes stuck to a corner where two walls meet the ceiling, which Dube describes as ‘a feminist insertion inside the neutral interior space of architecture’, it evokes the female body while also producing a vivid, angry reversal of the gaze.

In its exploration of erotic selfhood, it shares something with Sher-Gil, and in its conversation with architectural and natural form—the three planes that meet at the corner of a room, the glossy brittleness of ceramic eyes—it connects with Mohamedi.

It is among the most unsettling things you will see at the show and works somehow to bind together the various styles of the women artists on view at the museum.

‘Difficult Loves’ closed on 30 November, 2013. This piece was published in Open magazine.

An Insider's View: Richard Bartholomew's writings on Indian art

Richard Bartholomew, as a compilation of his writings reveals, was an art critic who didn’t let his friendships with the top artists of his time suppress his voice

(Written for Open magazine)

A Burmese émigré who had arrived in India in 1942, Richard Bartholomew entered the literary-cultural scene when studying English literature at St Stephen’s College, and then as a teacher of English at Delhi’s Modern School from 1951 to 1958. A poet and a photographer himself, he started writing and publishing as an art critic in 1955. From the late 1950s until his tragic and sudden death from a stroke in 1985, Bartholomew’s was the most important critical voice on the Delhi art scene, and he among the most important art critics in India. From 1977 till 1985, he took on, in addition, the onerous task of institution building as secretary of the Lalit Kala Akademi.

And yet, until 2009, when his son Pablo Bartholomew, himself a photographer, put his photographs together in a show and a book called The Critic’s Eye, Richard Bartholomew’s was not a name I knew. The Art Critic, self-published by Pablo after a difficult, muddled, often painful process that ended up taking 27 years (and which he gives partial voice to in a remarkably honest afterword), finally brings to a contemporary readership a definitive collection of Richard Bartholomew’s critical writings. Voluminous at roughly 200,000 words (edited down from the original 300,000), this is an ‘art book’ like no other.

Opinionated, often provocative, but always thoughtful, Bartholomew’s writing has the rare virtue of combining the survey and the longue durée with a marvellous immediacy, giving the present-day reader a privileged sense of modern Indian art ‘as it happened’.

The liveliness of his prose is also based on his ability to straddle worlds: while treating art with all the seriousness of a national mission, he constantly strives to translate what is essentially high culture into something that ordinary people—middle and upper middle-class readers of The Indian Express or The Times of India or Thought magazine—ought to be able to connect with, enjoy, and even if possible own. Sample: ‘The best thing about… ‘Graphic Workshop 1974’, organized in Baroda, is that each print has been brought out in a small edition of 50… [enabling work to be priced] at Rs 50 which is the price of a whiskey bottle or a cotton sari.’

It is a sensibility that can only have come from a critic who was on familiar, if not intimate, terms with many players in the art world—and yet wrote about it not for the coffee-table book or the rarefied academic volume but for the educated layperson. And also, perhaps, only from an art world still un-feted (and un-buffeted) by the market; Richard’s writing, writes Geeta Kapur, ‘matured on a typewriter in modest dwellings that neighboured the artists’ equally modest studio-apartments’.

Bartholomew himself saw his role with fierce clarity. ‘The critic who wishes to be articulate must be prepared to discuss reviews with artists; he must be at home in the artist’s studio and he must be an integral part of the art movement. If there is no art movement, he must try to foster one,’ he wrote in Cultural Forum in 1959. ‘It is imperative that he should have the respect of three institutions: (1) the public; (2) the artist; (3) the editor. This triple test disqualifies many for the vocation of criticism, for criticism is a supreme test of integrity.’

The book provides ample evidence that Richard held himself to these standards. He was close to several of the painters he wrote about—Ram Kumar, whom Richard and his wife Rati (then Batra) befriended at St Stephen’s College; Kanwal Krishna, having taught alongside him at Modern School (where Geeta Kapur first encountered the two of them as teachers and whose art room Krishna ‘treated for all the world like an artist’s atelier and evening hub’), and his wife, the artist and printmaker Devyani Krishna; A Ramachandran, who remembers Richard and Rati arriving at his barsati door to invite him and wife for dinner at their place, also in Jangpura; MF Husain; and Satish Gujral. And yet these are artists whose work received Richard’s most scrupulous honesty. Sample three statements on Husain’s paintings: in 1961 Richard can write, ‘As my acquaintance with Husain grows I begin to marvel at his virtuosity. Husain is a careless painter often; he is a facile painter sometimes; but Husain is a painter with a carefully selected repertoire, always.’ In 1965, he can write, ‘The 23 Husain drawings in this exhibition are good drawing-room pieces.’ And in a long essay on Husain published in a 1972 volume, he can make the following marvellous observation: ‘Men put so much energy into words, even if they do not believe all that is said. Husain puts that energy into paint.’

The integrity that Bartholomew brought to his work drew reactions in kind from the artists themselves. Here is Richard writing about Satish Gujral: ‘And when I criticised him for the want of finesse and conviction in the lettering and the slogans of his terracotta pieces of 1969-70, he had the heart and the good sense to take it in his stride, though it hurt. “A man doesn’t do what he has succeeded in doing all the time,” [he said].’

He draws analogies and references from far afield, from literature and poetry most of all, but also in vivid prose, from the natural and cultural environment of his adoptive country. Here he is on Raza’s Indian palette: ‘His colours are those of the Banaras brocade, the Gujarati manuscript, the blazing intensity of the Indian summer with its glory of the gulmohur and the laburnum.’ Reading Richard’s writing, in fact, one has not the slightest sense of the outsider’s trepidation, or desire not to offend.

On the contrary, one is pleasantly surprised by the forthright way in which he broaches, for instance, such presumably sensitive subjects as Bengali dominance. In a 1959 piece called ‘Art in the Shadow of Official Patronage’, he took the Lalit Kala Akademi to task for several things, including its institution of a tripartite division of art submissions for a prize into ‘oriental, academic-realistic, and modern’. ‘Manifestly this is a move to provide sanction to the decadent and dying Bengal School, for which Mr Barada Ukil, the Secretary, and Mr DP Roy Chowdhury, the Chairman, must necessarily have much sentimental attachment… it is pertinent to point out that three centres of art instruction in this country are being managed by Bengali artists, by Mr BC Sanyal in Delhi, Mr Bishwanath Mukerji in Hyderabad, and by Mr Chintamani Kar in Calcutta. The Curator of the National Gallery of Modern Art, Mr Pradosh Das Gupta, is also a Bengali. For better or for worse, there is the influence of Bengalis at the top official places in Indian art today. The general ambivalence, therefore, is understandable.’

And yet, there is no slanderous gossip here, no personal slurs. What there is is a deep-rooted, not always rational, distaste for the ‘nostalgia’ and ‘romanticism’ of the Bengal School. But even this avowed critical disdain for nostalgia and romanticism is never allowed to swamp his instinctively positive response to a body of work. About Amrita Sher-Gil, for example, he writes with empathy rather than dismissal: ‘The pensively stanced figures of the countryside in a Sher-Gil painting breathe a romanticism that is born of the regret that these things were passing away.’

It is impossible to do justice to this vast volume in a short review. But suffice it to say that Bartholomew is attentive to the smallest detail in a work of art, writing passionately about colour and light and form, the stroke that creates the hunch of a back—while never shying away from the big picture questions that you almost rarely hear asked anymore: Is modern Indian art merely imitative of Western art? What does its Indianness consist of? What is the role of State patronage? You may or may not agree with his answers, but it is more than sufficient pleasure to discover so fine an interlocutor—and one you did not know existed.

Published in Open magazine, 20 Oct 2012.