Petition for a New NGMA

I went to the Amrita Sher Gil retrospective at the NGMA, Mumbai, this morning. And had an experience that was disconcerting, to say the least. How is possible for one exhibition to leave me curious and interested, and incredibly annoyed, all at the same time? Here's how.  

The mounting of this show reveals a complete absence of imagination on the part of the curatorial team. Somewhere along the line, someone said (or thought) the following, and set events in motion accordingly. "Let's find a sparkling, provocative personality and a significant artistic influence and pay tribute to her. Let's structure her prodigious body of work chronologically because what other approach is there? Let's only have the most turgid, textbook curator-speak typed out on posters at the beginning of each section, and let's not include any other notes that may help give a viewer a perspective on the work or the artist as they walk through those sections. Let's use the same high-intensity lighting for all the works, so that some of them cannot be seen clearly, no matter what the angle. And right at the end of the show, to make up for the absence of detail along the way, let's gum up massive print outs of photos from the artist's life and quotes from her letters. Let's not worry about the fact that these print outs are unevenly pasted and ripping from the excess glue and would be approximately 10 times more interesting in context to, maybe, a painting." 

Just last weekend, I was so excited when I heard about this retrospective. Firstly, because I wanted to see more of Sher Gil's work, and secondly, because I was hoping it meant that the moribund NGMA, Mumbai was scraping its way back to relevance. As it so happens, this show is entirely in keeping with almost everything else the NGMA has served up under Rajeev Lochan's Delhi-based stewardship. Gone are the ambitiously mounted shows, the collaborations with international museums and galleries, the weekend and holiday art workshops for kids, the guided tours and the crowds. What we have instead are shows that pass through the city on their way across the country, interspersed only by repeated rearrangements of the institute's existing collections and virtually zero public engagement.  

Photo Credit: www.buzzintown.com

If this sounds like a rant, that's because it is. I remember how the NGMA used to be when it was run by Dr. Sarayu Doshi - collections by the great Indian modernists, the city's first brush with Picasso, with Egyptian exhibits from the British Musuem, with Italian post-modernism, with Fluxus, the sense that something new was happening here every month. Post the Cowasjee Jehangir Hall's restoration and inauguration, the NGMA was where many people in the city had their first brush with international art, with public exhibitions and with careful, thoughtful curation. Prior to this, the only themed multi-artist exhibitions I had seen were the RPG sponsored annual shows at the Jehangir Art Gallery. 

The NGMA Mumbai's decline since Dr. Doshi's departure has been steep and has remained unchecked in spite of some publicly aired misgivings. In the last five years, I can count the number of interesting shows I have seen here on the fingers of one hand - the TIFR's collection of modern Indian art (2011), a Bollywood and film themed exhibition celebrating a 100 years of Indian cinema (2012), and the Rabindranath Tagore and Homai Vyarawalla retrospectives (2013 and 2011 respectively). Most of these exhibitions were launched in Delhi and passed through Mumbai as a matter of form. Even the TIFR show can be attributed to the energies of the that institute's director, and not to any lapse into initiative at the NGMA. Girish Shahane made many of these points in a trenchant post written about 3.5 years ago. Since then, little has changed.

This is just not good enough for what is supposed to be a premier art space in the country's financial capital. Across the way, the stately Prince of Wales museum has reinvented itself. The Bhau Daji Lad has also been consistently and imaginatively engaging with the city's community since its overhaul. 

It seems the NGMA has witnessed the appointment of a new Director for Mumbai, a Mr. Shivaprasad Khened. But Mr. Lochan's shadow must loom large, because any signs of a new dispensation and new energies are conspicuous by their absence. Mumbai needs more cultural spaces and museums, but the present NGMA is doing us a disservice, occupying prime real estate and consuming public resources and giving back very little in return, other than subsidized rentals for theater groups during the Kala Ghoda Festival. I don't know who's paying attention, and I'll wager nobody is, but since the new government claims to be coming in with cleaning supplies and a big broom, maybe I'll drop them a tweet. Or two.  

The Polymath As Painter

It is difficult, if not impossible, to visit the 'Last Harvest,' an exhibition of over 200 of Rabindranath Tagore's artworks, with a truly open mind. After all, one is talking about India's greatest polymath, a man equal parts poet, playwright, philosopher, cultural ambassador, educator, writer and humanist. His genius is authentic and undisputed. One hundred and fifty years after his birth, his ideas continue to resonate, his large body of work continues to move and to inspire. Surely, his paintings and sketches can be no different, even if the man himself was modest and diffident about them, describing his skill as limited and his interest as more of an indulgence, an infatuation? And so, one approaches the exhibition in a spirit of respectful curiosity. Critique is superfluous.

But I do have my opinions, and my overriding impression is that Rabindranath Tagore was not a great artist, but an interesting and significant one, although I would contend that at least some of the significance derives from the fact that Tagore was, well, Tagore. 

He started out making idiosyncratic doodles - forms in the margins of books, attempts to convert unseemly jottings and scratchings in his writing into larger patterns. His friend Victoria Ocampo encouraged him to pursue this fledgling interest and he eventually exhibited publicly in Paris in May 1930. His work was acclaimed,and travelled to other countries before being shown in Calcutta in 1931. 

This idiosyncrasy is evident in the first part of the exhibition - an aggregation of softly sinuous or severely angular forms rendered in pen, ink, pastels and watercolours. These are mostly fantastical creatures, monsters, flights of fancy that seem vaguely Asian or Polynesian, the substance of ancient art and old stories, simultaneously strange and familiar. The second part of the exhibition, devoted to inky landscapes, left me cold. The third and fourth parts - drawings of people, group scenes and faces - were the most rewarding. Tagore had a profound and sensitive understanding of character, drama and gesture and it's no surprise that all of the figures and faces in the exhibition express and emote. The women with their baleful eyes and elongated heads leave an indistinct, hazy impression, although there a couple of pen and ink drawings that are  so cleanly delineated and whimsical that they could almost have been drawn by another hand. 

Overall, the dark colour schemes, the smudgings, cross-hatchings and soft lines all combine to make you feel like you have wandered into a part of Tagore's mind where things are ideas are still suggestions and forms unresolved. Tagore spoke of his painting and sketching as having a rhythm and meaning that didn't require explanation. I'm not sure about the meaning, but there is a rhythm here - sibilant, soft, slow, serious and very occasionally, lilting. 

In his art, as in other spheres, he was modern before his time and by some accounts he catalyzed modern Indian art. When I look at his work I am reminded forcefully of KG Subramanyan's, and Subramanyan was himself a pioneer. Tagore was a titan before he picked up the paintbrush in his late sixties. And while his art does not build his genius, it does burnish it.