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[Lead Essay]

A view of a gallery at the NGMA, New Delhi. IMAGE COURTESY THE NGMA.

A HISTORY OF NOW
Kavita Singh reflects on the evolution of the art museum in post-Independence
India and assesses what it means to be trapped in ‘the historical modern’.
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The head of the Visual Arts Center of Qatar seen
visiting The Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art,
inaugurated by the Shah of Iran in 1978.
On display is a painting by the American Abstract
Expressionist Jackson Pollock.
MODERN ART MUSEUMS IN NON-WESTERN LANDS
In the summer of 1976, Imelda Marcos went shopping. Not for shoes, as one
would expect: no, this time the wife of the Philippine dictator was trawling
through museums, galleries and private collections in New York and
Washington, looking for art loans for the opening show of the Metropolitan
Museum of Manila. Assembled in a mere four weeks, this museum was housed
in a hurriedly converted military building. It had no collection of its own, and
indeed it needed none, since its remit was to show exclusively ‘non-Philippine’
art through borrowed examples of Western modernism.
Mrs. Marcos’ museum was put together to a deadline, as its opening was to be
a cultural sidelight to an important IMF-World Bank meeting in Manila that
eventually sanctioned more funds to prop up the Marcos dictatorship. If the
museum’s stated aim was “to broaden our people’s awareness of the cultures of
the world,”i perhaps its real purpose lay in displaying the Marcoses to the
gathered bankers as enlightened autocrats capable of bringing modernity to
their corner of the world.
Elsewhere in Asia, another dictator was assembling a modern art museum at
more or less the same time. Unlike the museum in Manila, however, his
institution was not an empty shell: its collection was a roll-call of modernist
masters, from Pissarro through Picasso to Pollock. This large collection was said
to have been acquired at a cost of $30 million, a startlingly large sum at the
time. This, the most important collection of modern western art outside the
west, was purchased for the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, an
institution that was inaugurated by the Shah of Iran in 1978, just months before
his fall. As a critic suggests, the Shah needed such ‘Western-style museums to
complete the facade of modernity he constructed for Western eyes.’ ii
ART India
[Lead Essay]
The Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art was only one of several of the Shah’s
projects that brought western avant-garde art to Iran even as his regime
suppressed free speech and political dissent among the Iranian people. Through
the 1970s Iran also witnessed the Shiraz Performing Arts Festival, which hosted
the likes of Merce Cunningham and John Cage in Iran; the vanguardism of
their performances, in turn, stirred a powerful reaction that contributed to the
Islamic Revolution of 1979.iii With the Islamic Revolution, the Shiraz Festival
was suspended, but the Tehran Museum’s western art collection was not
destroyed or dispersed; it remains in the Tehran MOCA but is mostly kept in
storage away from the public gaze.iv
The Metropolitan Museum of Manila and the Tehran Museum of
Contemporary Art illustrate one form taken by the museum of modern art in
the non-western world. In the vision that shapes these museums, modernism
and modernity are assumed to belong to, and be entirely constituted by, the
west. In these circumstances, a museum of modern art inevitably is a museum
of western art. Bringing canonised examples of modernism from Paris or New
York to Manila and Tehran, these museums make little or no reference to local
art production, which is assumed by definition to be excluded from the circuits
of both modernity and modernism. Of course, it is no coincidence that our two
examples of museums of this sort – museums of modernism from above – were
planted in their countries by autocratic rulers, whose client-relationship with
western powers alienated them from their own countrymen, even as they made
them appear to the outside world as enlightened despots capable of bringing
modernity to their own backward nations.
In contrast, museums like India’s National Gallery of Modern Art illustrate the
other, inverse, paradigm for modern art museums built outside the west. India’s
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[Lead Essay]

National Gallery limits itself to tracing modernity as it was enacted since the
mid-19th Century within what are now the boundaries of the Indian nation-
state. By collecting and displaying art made by modern Indian artists, and to a
lesser extent, by non-Indian artists working in India, the NGMA tells the story
of a localised, non-western modernity in art.

Indeed, in the National Gallery’s story of Indian art, it is western influence that is
marginal, for it seems only to provide the initial germ for genres and movements
that then grow organically in the native soil. In a narrative that mimics Alfred
Barr’s (in)famous characterization of the history of modern western art as a series
of movements in revolt against their predecessors, in India’s National Gallery of
Modern Art, we see the colonial importation of academic painting as a first
intimation of the ‘modern’ in Indian art. In time, this is supplanted by the
indigenist Bengal School; the Bengal School’s nostalgic mode is rejected by Sher-
Gil, and later, by the Bombay Progressives; their aggressive, expressionistic forms
are cast aside by abstractionists, some of whom produce an indigenous
abstraction in the ‘neo-Tantra’ mode; abstraction’s disengagement from the world
then acts as a spur for the politically committed new narrative painters; so on and
so forth. The story of modern Indian art is retold as an internal dialogue between
Indian players; here, the west appears as an occasional resource for motifs and
styles, rather than as the fount and source of modernity itself.
Perhaps, the idea of a more or less insular national-modern art seems artificial –
modernism is, after all, about connections and transgressions, not about
nationally-bounded legacies and heritages. And yet, the occurrence of this kind
of modern art museum upon the Indian soil is no accident. The National
Gallery of Modern Art is one of many instruments that India has used in her
long project of claiming modernity for herself. For, as Partha Chatterjee says, it
was soon understood in colonial India that ‘Given the close complicity between
modern knowledges and modern regimes of power, we should ever remain
consumers of universal modernity; never would we be taken seriously as its
producers. It is for this reason that we have tried, for over a hundred years, to
take our eyes away from this chimera of universal modernity and clear up a
space where we might become creators of our own modernity.‘v
MODERN ART AND NATIONAL MYTHS
Today, many critics see India’s National Gallery of Modern Art as a slow-moving
beast entangled in red tape, unable to respond to the quick-changing art scene
and its needs. But in 1954 when it was established, the NGMA was an
institution far ahead of its time, being virtually a unique example of a modern
art museum in a newly independent land.
The decade after the Second World War had seen colonial empires retreat,
leading to the formation of a slew of decolonized nations. In a ritual celebration
of their newly-gained sovereignty, country after country founded a National
Museum or renamed a pre-existing colonial museum as such. Typically, these
National Museums celebrated the art of the past: the grandeur of ancient
civilizations would testify to the new nation’s long history and high culture. In
the narrative of these museums, the nation’s future greatness became an
inevitability, a renewal of a glorious pre-colonial past. vi
Modern art had no role to play in this national myth, and it should not surprise
us that practically no new state in Asia or Africa established a modern art
Gaganendranath Tagore. Magician. Watercolour on paper. 34 cms x 26.7 cms.
IMAGE COURTESY THE NGMA, NEW DELHI.
museum by national fiat at this time. Instead, modern art produced in these
states was occasionally tacked on to the tail-end of the civilizational narrative of
the national museum. Where separate modern art galleries or museums were
established in the newly decolonized states in their early years, these tended to
be relatively modest institutions set up through private initiatives, typically, by
artists’ groups or by private collectors. State-sponsored museums of modern art
began to appear in post-colonial nations only in the 1980s, and the majority of
these were founded much later, in the 1990s or the first years of the 2000s. A
notable exception to this pattern, then, is India, with its nationally-mandated
National Gallery for Modern Art established in 1954, a mere six years after the
coming of Independence.vii
The exigencies that led to the establishment of the National Gallery compose a
curious tale.viii Briefly recounted, this is a story of the group of artists trained
in the traditionalizing Bengal school who petitioned the government of newly
independent India to set up a prestigious modern art museum, one that they
intended to control. The government resisted these demands, not in order to
deny the project, but to appropriate it, in order to ensure that India’s premier
art gallery would be more modern, and more broadly representative, than any
institution the artist group was likely to produce.
Through the 1930s and 40s, the two Bengal-school-trained brothers Sarada
and Barada Ukil had built a national artists’ network and mounted annual art
exhibitions, making themselves spokespersons for the constituency of Indian
artists. They also appealed to the government and to other likely sources of
patronage, to grant them land and funds to build a National Gallery of Art.
Given the indigenist leanings of their own practice, however, their project was
likely to be a Gallery of National Art: art that displayed an ‘Indian’ character
by reviving traditions of the past. In 1949, what the Ukils wished for was both
given and taken away: they received a piece of land in the heart of New Delhi

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[Lead Essay]

In their own special ways, Jawaharlal Nehru and Amrita Sher-Gil were crucial to the development of the NGMA. Here, they meet in an imagined encounter in Vivan Sundaram’s Meeting in Gorakhpur,
1940 (Detail) from 2002. Each panel is 20”x 24”. (The work is based on two photographs in the third panel taken at Saraya Sugar Factory, 1940. The photographer remains unknown.)

for their gallery; but what they would build here would be just a gallery – the NGMA, the collection began to take on the contours of an impartial and even-
All India Fine Arts and Crafts Society — while the government itself decided handed representation of the history of modern Indian art.
to build and control the gallery of independent India – the National Gallery of
Modern Art. MUSEUMIZING THE MODERN: ESTABLISHED CANONS AND MOVEABLE FEASTS

As with many forward-looking projects of the time, the NGMA too is said to
have come about at Jawaharlal Nehru’s behest. Amrita Sher-Gil, an artist Nehru
had known and admired, had died, and her family offered her works to the
nation. In the absence of an appropriate institution that could buy and display
Sher-Gil’s paintings, Nehru saw to the acquisition of the works, and then to the
founding of a National Gallery of whose collection these works would form the
core. At one stroke, Nehru founded a major, new institution, and gave it a
decisive direction by allying it with ‘forward-looking’, internationalizing
currents in modern Indian art. The presence of more than one hundred works
by Sher-Gil in the collection simply would not allow the NGMA to become an
outpost of the Bengal School. Instead, when the works of Abanindranath
Tagore, Nandalal Bose and other Bengal School artists were acquired by the
It is here, at this point, that we rub up against the rough grain of contradictions
that seem to be built in the concept of a museum of modern art. If the idea of
the ‘modern’ suggests a liquid purling, the idea of the ‘museum’ suggests solid
authority; if the idea of the ‘modern’ suggests art that immediately surrounds us
and is unpredictable in its unfolding, the idea of the ‘museum’ suggests the
distanced historical gaze, which alights assuredly upon select artists and works.
The question often asked is: How does one make a museum of modern art?
How does one write the history of one’s contemporaries?
When museums collect the art of the past, circumstances and historical distance
have already narrowed the corpus that is available for collection. Fewer things
remain, and there is already an understanding of the flow of history, the phases

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[Lead Essay]
Works like these do not have any takers in institutions like the NGMA.
Susanta Mandal. It Doesn’t Bite. Steel structure with glass bottle, soap solution, air pump, timer,
black granite. 25.5”x 19.6”x 8.8”. 2007. Installation view from the show Where in the World at
the Devi Art Foundation. PHOTOGRAPH BY AMIT KUMAR JAIN.
and phenomena that must be represented. This is not so for museums that set
out to collect art that was recently made or is still being produced at the time of
collection. In such cases, museums have to struggle with too much information
and too many available works, too many interests seeking to include certain
artists and objects within the canons they form. How is a museum to shape its
collection with an eye on history when it is amassing things from its own
amorphous present?
When the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) was set up in New York in 1929,
it was the first museum of modern art in the world. Entering uncharted
territory, it had to grapple with the philosophical problem of museumizing the
‘now’. In time, the narratives developed by this institution, and especially its
first director, Alfred Barr Jr., became the orthodox history of ‘mainstream’
modernist art. In the early years of his career, however, Alfred Barr characterized
the ideal modern art museum as a “torpedo of art”. The modern art museum
should be constantly moving forward, he said, shedding the past as it hurtles
towards the future. When it was founded, MoMA had planned to literally put
this philosophy into practice; as works from its collection became ‘historical’ –
by becoming canonical or becoming more than fifty years old – MoMA
intended to ‘retire’ them by selling them to an historical museum, while it
redefined its collection with newer and more contemporary works. Barr thought
of his museum an unstable entity, filled with restless energy, constantly chasing
the outer edge of art. A growing permanent collection would only weigh the
museum down: owning art would bring too many responsibilities and make too
many demands on the museum’s finite resources of space, money and skills.
In keeping with this philosophy, in 1947, the MoMA sold some 26 of its ‘classic’
works to the Metropolitan Museum. But this sale was never followed by any
others. In time, the MoMA found itself unable to give up prized works that it
had made famous, and which visitors came to the MoMA to see. Trapped in its
30 ART India The Art News Magazine of India [June 2010 Volume XV Issue I]
Gallery Maskara, Mumbai, is a warehouse-sized space, where exhibitions of avant-guard art are often
mounted. Seen here is Shine Shivan’s Psycho Phallus (2009) made out of cow-dung, grass, wood.
Each structure is 136” x 72” x 96”. IMAGE COURTESY GALLERY MASKARA.
own canon, the modern art museum became the custodian of a ‘historical
modern;’ instead of chasing the future of art, it entered the retrospective mode.ix
Our own NGMA too, is enfolded in a similar aura of ‘past-ness.’ Its halls unfurl
a rich narrative that takes us through the Company School, Indian salon
painters, the Bengal School, Sher-Gil and the Bombay Progressives, the ‘Neo-
Tantra’ phenomenon of the ’70s and even the Baroda narrative artists, but the
retelling tends to loosen after this point. It would be hard to trace developments
of the 1980s onward in its galleries, harder still to find more than a nod to the
extraordinary energy mobilising India’s art scene from the late 1990s on to the
present. The NGMA’s most confident narration is of a history of early
modernity, seen from a vantage point at least half a century away.
Why has the NGMA adopted this historicizing mode? Is it through a conscious
choice, to be a museum of the history of Indian modernism? Is that why, in its
collection, one does not get a sense of the energy, the daring, even the excesses
of recent and contemporary Indian art? Is this the result of conservative tastes?
In truth, the lacunae in NGMA’s collection may reflect not so much timidity in
taste, as fiscal limitations, bureaucratic impediments and the burden of being a
public institution in the age of RTI.
At the time of Independence, many artists’ groups had urged the government to
be a patron, to commission and collect works so that artists might survive.
Today, as the art market has grown and taken prices to great heights, the tables
have turned. Governmental institutions such as the NGMA simply do not have
the funds to compete with other buyers to acquire significant works. Of the
things that are within its means, what the NGMA buys has, so far, been decided
by Acquisition Committees that are appointed from time to time. The nature
of the committee appointed would, naturally, affect the kinds of decisions it
made. But as a public institution, one assumes that the NGMA is bound to use
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Chittaprosad (1915 –1978). Photographs of Chittaprosad with family and friends; Press
clipping – an article with Chittaprosad’s prints, published in Kino, Prague, Vol. XXVIII, No. 01,
1973, p.13; Letters – First letter (Behind the photographs) to mother from Andheri (Bombay),
27th of April, 1972; Second letter (middle) from his friend, Copenhagen, 22nd of September
1964; Third letter/sketch to Munuma, 6th of April, 1972; Fourth letter (bottom) to sister from
Bombay, 27th of March, 1972; Catalogue – (on the right) First page of the Catalogue with artist’s
photo (date and place not mentioned).
public money responsibly. At the very least, funds would have to be spent on
physically stable objects, that would be available to be counted from one
inventory to the next. The instability of materials used today by many artists –
cowdung patties, human hair, incense ash, soap bubbles, cloth stained with
menstrual blood – renders these works simply uncollectable by an institution of
this kind. As a result, the NGMA’s collection is dominated by canvases, prints,
and sculptures in wood and stone.
Of the ‘newer‘ media arts, the NGMA recently started to acquire photography
for its collection, but it has not yet begun to collect video or performance art.
A simple reason for this may be that in the past ten years, through the burst of
creativity and experimentation on the Indian art scene, the NGMA has had
only one meeting of an Acquisition Committee, in 2003. Earlier, when objects
had been acquired for the NGMA in Mumbai, controversies had arisen. There
were accusations of nepotism and favours done to friends; a court case had
followed; and the government, in this age of public interest litigation and the
Right to Information Act, was chary of putting a foot down wrong, and
preferred not to acquire works at all.
As a result of these circumstances, India’s prime governmental institution for
modern art has missed the opportunity to collect through an important phase in
our unfolding history. Inevitably, this has affected the nature of the institution.
In times to come, the large collections of Amrita Sher-Gil, Nandalal Bose and
other Bengal School artists that the NGMA was able to acquire early in its career
are likely to remain its strengths. But as things stand, it would be difficult for this
ART India
[Lead Essay]
Nikhil Biswas (1930 –1966). Sketches and notes from his notebook
(Date and place not mentioned). Some galleries have begun collecting and documenting
material on artists. Seen in these two panels and the panel on the next page are
some of the items collected by the Delhi Art Gallery.
institution to become a Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art.
To be fair, it must be acknowledged that to become trapped thus in the
historical modern is the fate of most museums of modern art, even those not
encumbered by the NGMA’s limiting acquisition policies. It would be beyond
any museum’s means to expand its collection infinitely, to add every noteworthy
work of art or to represent every emergent trend. Most museum collections tend
to ‘balloon’ at certain points – at founding, or when they receive major bequests.
The character of the museum then becomes defined by the objects and periods
that dominate its collection.
If Barr’s “torpedo of art” exists today, it does so in the shifting landscape of
Biennales and art fairs that are now such a prominent feature across the globe.
Ephemeral events that assemble vast collections of artworks and probe novel
curatorial propositions, the biennales gather, display and disperse their exhibits
in a matter of months in a spectacle of continual reinvention. Here is the
moveable feast of the truly contemporary, up-to-the-minute museum which
assembles and then disbands itself in an unrelenting pursuit of the new.
Unburdened by permanent collections, biennales do not have to commit to any
period or a position. They are the torpedoes without history, without memory,
having only the endless lunge into the void of future space.
MUSEUMS AND MARKETS: MEMORY AND AMNESIA
But who can live by floating exclusively on the promise of the future, relinquishing
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[Lead Essay]
Indra Dugar (1918 –1989): announcement of the 8th Sangeet Shyamala Award, Calcutta, 1986.
Nandalal Bose (1882–1966): Catalogue page (Date and place not mentioned);
Ramendranath Chakravorty (1902 – 55): Catalogue and Post-card with a woodcut of a Santhal
woman, Calcutta, 6th of July 1955; K. G. Subramanyan (b. 1924): Brochure, Dept. of Posts, 14th
of March 1994; Asit Kumar Haldar (1890 –1964): First Day Covers, Dept. of Posts, 28th of
December 1991. ALL IMAGES COURTESY OF DELHI ART GALLERY. COLLECTION OF DELHI ART
GALLERY. COPYRIGHT: DELHI ART GALLERY PVT. LTD., NEW DELHI.
the need for the firm ground of present and past beneath their feet? In his beautiful
writings on the place of memory and memorialization in contemporary life,
Andreas Huyssen asks us to consider the frenetic pace of life, the planned
obsolescence of products, the dissolution of public space into the channels of
instant entertainment, all of which conspire to create ‘the virus of amnesia that
threatens to consume memory itself.’x In reaction, we see today the proliferation
of many kinds of recursions to the past: from neo-nationalism to religious
fundamentalism to the current boom in museums, all of which are produced by
‘mortal bodies that want to hold on to their temporality’ for a while.xi
In the last twenty years, as the contemporary Indian art scene bourgeoned, it
came to inhabit a quick-changing landscape, chaotic and full of possibilities.
New art from India became abundant and mobile. Unmarked as ‘heritage,’ it
was not hemmed in by the nationalistic laws that restrict the movement of older
art out of the country.xii Instead, contemporary Indian art travelled smoothly
across borders to international exhibitions and biennales, and was seen and sold
at art fairs and in galleries in cities across the world.
At first, we in India heard only murmurs about the stunning installations and
large-scale sculptures by ‘our’ artists that were being seen and sold abroad.
Gradually, however, the local galleries that facilitated the movement out of these
artworks and artists, began showing these works in here as well as out there. In
the 1990s, benefiting from the trickle-back of international market successes,
some Indian galleries physically grew into warehouse-sized spaces, and became
able to mount ambitious exhibitions and works within India as well.
32 ART India The Art News Magazine of India [June 2010 Volume XV Issue I]
As the circuits of display and discussion broadened and the scent of money
became sweet and strong, the market for art within India expanded
exponentially. Soon, the Indian art market became the perfect microcosmic
reflection of a newly liberalized economy. Entrepreneurship flourished and the
old days of an art world controlled by official patronage receded like a socialist
dream at the 21st century’s dawn. At the same time, this art market was like any
market; as returns began to flow from speculation rather than production, the
same kinds of manipulation and corruption rife in other speculative markets
came to live here as well. Above all, the market was restless and insatiable, always
hungry for more: more dazzling new works from younger artists; fresher art
school graduates to place your bets upon; more unknown masterpieces
discovered in the storerooms of more established artists; more forgotten masters
whose works deserve exhumation, display and sale.
As the art market exhumed, consumed, displayed and distributed artworks
across the globe, did an anxiety begin to mount about the radical nature of this
dispersal? Month after month, things were made, found, shown, sold: a brilliant
new artist discovered yesterday, a precious sketch of a ‘master’ unearthed in an
attic, all held up to the glow of publicity for one bright moment before
vanishing into private collections. Contemporary Indian art was being scattered
to the winds. Even the evanescent spectacles of the biennales leave behind a
memory trace in the form of the website and the book. In the churning world
of contemporary Indian art, what space was there for the memory of
contemporary Indian art to live?
In the absence of public institutions that could form the repositories of the art of
the time, or a developed academy that could build the archives or write the books
about the period, today in India, I believe, the art market itself has begun to take
on some of the museum’s role. It is the market that is producing the discourse,
through web-resources, auction catalogues and books; it is the market that is re-
writing our art history by conducting research and bringing old and new artists
to new prominence; it is the market that is building the archive of modern and
contemporary art. Think here of the extraordinary collections built by Osian’s,
for instance, or of the Delhi Art Gallery that has been collecting not just art
works from artists, but their diaries, scrap-books and letters with an eye to the
histories that will be written in times to come. One can see this effort cynically,
as just a market tactic – for in the art world, the production of knowledge about
artworks is also the production of value for them. Or one can see this more
generously – for these initiatives on the part of commercial galleries, of making
publications, funding research, building libraries, organizing courses and public
lectures, seem to go well beyond the demands of self-interest.
Beyond the gallery, in India, we now have the nascent category of the
contemporary art museum. At least four such institutions have opened or are
planned. In Delhi, the Devi Art Foundation has already been open for two
years, in which it has not just shown its stunning and sometimes audacious
collection but has supported extraordinary curatorial work. The Kiran Nadar
Museum of Art has just put its wide-ranging collection on show, bringing to the
Indian public possibly the only Anish Kapoor sculpture in India, among its
many other remarkable works. These are two instances of private collectors who
have established what are truly our only museums of contemporary art.
But commercial galleries too seem ready to commit themselves to a non-profit
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realm. The Vadehra Art Gallery already has an active education wing – FICA –
which gives awards to artists and art-writers and runs pedagogic programmes,
but the gallery plans to build a museum soon, which will house a large
permanent collection. And the promoters of CIMA art gallery in Kolkata have
announced the ambitious KMoMA, the first contemporary art museum in
India that will be built by a starchitect – Harry Gugger, formerly of the Herzog
+ de Meuron firm, who was responsible for the Tate Modern in London, the
Laban Centre outside London and the Schaulager Laurenz Foundation in Basel.
In recent years, critics in Europe and America have bemoaned the increasing
infiltration of market forces into their museums. In India today, we seem to
stand in an altogether different place, where the market is making the museum.
Preserving archives, amassing collections, building infrastructure: the
contemporary art museum is coming to India through the initiatives of private
foundations, at least two of which emerge from commercial galleries. In the
absence of the older form of public institutions that would serve the field of the
contemporary, it seems private and commercial organizations have found ways
of being responsible citizens of the art world.
END-NOTES
i Imelda Romualdez Marcos, Manila, to the CCP President, Manila, 15th of September 1976,
TDS, photo-copied in The Metropolitan Museum of Manila Foundation, Inc. (Manila:
Metropolitan Museum of Manila, 1986), n.p. cited in Roberto Paulino, ‘The Metropolitan
Museum of Manila,’ http://www.trauma-interrupted.org/robert/writing1. pdf viewed on the
25th of April 2010.
ii Carol Duncan, ‘Art Museums and the Ritual of Citizenship’, Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine
(eds.) Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, Washington DC,
Smithsonian, 1991, p 89.
iii See Robert Gluck, ‘The Shiraz Arts Festival: Western Avant-Garde Art in 1970s Iran,’
Leonardo, Vol. 40, No. 1, 2007, pp 20-28.
iv Robert Tait, ‘The Art No-one Sees,’ The Guardian, 29th of October 2007, online at
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/oct/29/artnews.iran as on the 25th of April 2010.
ART India
[Lead Essay]
Works on display at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art. (From left):
Anish Kapoor’s Untitled (2009); Tyeb Mehta’s Untitled (1975);
V. S. Gaitonde’s Untitled (1988); Venkat Bothsa’s Enigma – 24 (2006).
On the facing wall is A. Ramachandran’s Towards the Sun (2004).
v Partha Chatterjee, Our Modernity, Sephis Codesria, Djakarta, 1997, p. 14 (emphasis added).
The subject of ‘other’ modernities is now a small industry within the academy. Frequently cited
writings include Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture (Routledge, 1994). For an excellent
overview of the issues involved, see Timothy Mitchell, ‘The Stage of Modernity’ in his Questions
of Modernity, Minessota, 2000.
vi See Flora E. Kaplan, ‘Introduction,’ in Museums and the Making of “Ourselves”: the role of
objects in national identity, Leicester University Press, 1994.
vii It should be noted that in the west too, most museums of modern art are established through
the efforts of artists’ groups or private collectors. The ‘national’ state-sponsored museums of
modern art often come about after and are contingent upon the museums of national
civilization. A prime example of this would be the Musee d’Orsay, Paris, which was established
in 1986, when the department of modern art was split off from the Louvre whose collection had
become unwieldily large.
viii Vidya Shivadas deals with the fascinating story of the establishment of the National Gallery
of Modern Art in her forthcoming article, ‘Museumising Modern Art: the National Gallery of
Modern Art, an Indian Case-Study’ in Saloni Mathur and Kavita Singh (eds.) No Touching, No
Spitting, No Praying: Modalities of the Museum in South Asia, Routledge, Forthcoming. The brief
account in the following paragraphs is indebted to her essay. Shivadas’ earlier article, ‘National
Gallery of Modern Art: museums and the making of national art,’ is also an illuminating study
of another phase of the history of this institution, viz. the invention of an ‘Indian’ abstract art
tradition under the aegis of the NGMA in the 1970s and 80s. This was published in Towards a
New Art History (eds. Shivaji Panikkar, et al), D K Printworld, 2003.
ix Allan Wallach, ‘The Museum of Modern Art: The Past’s Future,’ Journal of Design History,
Vol. 5, No. 3, 1992, pp. 207-215.
x Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: marking time in a culture of amnesia, Routledge, 1995,
p. 7
xi Huyssen, p. 9.
xii In contrast to the free market of contemporary art, which rises and goes into free-fall like
other markets, the antiquities trade is over-regulated in India. Strict laws pertain to not just the
sale but the mere possession of antiquities, here described as artefacts more than 100 years old.
This accounts for the under-developed (or perhaps under-ground) nature of the antiquities
trade. For an overview of the strict regime of rules surrounding the trade in antiquities, and the
problems they produce, see Naman P. Ahuja, ‘India: A Tale of Two Markets: While the
Contemporary Market Thrives, the Regulations regarding Antiquities Desperately Need
Reform’ in The Art Newspaper, September 2008, No. 194, London.
The Art News Magazine of India [June 2010 Volume XV Issue I] 33