RESHMA PATIL I MUMBAIIN between bustling from his laboratory to a lecture hall, a theoretical physics professor cannot stop gazing at a Hussain. He tears his gaze away, only to have it fall on an ‘Apparition on the Beach’. He can’t help himself, for not a single wall — in tool room, corridor, lounge and office — is without an oil or a watercolour. Still lifes, a spring nude, women with kites, Krishna, fisherwomen, Durga, sunflowers, sea gulls, Christ, mehfil, Allah, a village in Goa, a night queen and lovers live in with particle physics, algorithms and advanced mathematics.India’s finest collection of progressive art hangs at Land’s End, Mumbai, in an institution modelled on Nehruvian ideals of a state propelled by scientific temper. At the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), this art count starts at one, two, three. 250 masterpieces, 276 if you count the sculptures.‘‘Most TIFR art was picked up when today’s masters were upcoming artists. That was Bhabha’s genius. Some paintings were bought for Rs 300-400 in the ’50s and ’60s. Today they are worth lakhs,’’ says a TIFR official. The story goes that Homi J Bhabha, architect of India’s atomic energy programme, habitually dropped by at art galleries and exhibitions on opening day, often picking up an oil or watercolour on impulse or chatting up amateur artists.Atomic Energy in India, 50 years, brought out by the department of atomic energy in 1998, traces Bhabha’s interest to his family: ‘‘The Bhabha family had cultivated interests in the fine arts — particularly western classical music and painting — that aroused Bhabha’s aesthetic sensibilities, and remained as a dominant influence in all the creative work he undertook during his life time.’’This master scientist’s artistic interests are best shown off in the Bhabha Auditorium, which has 15 of the TIFR’s best artworks. K Sridhar, a professor of theoretical physics who’s planning to curate an art show, points to his favourite: a 1971 Tyeb characterised by the signature diagnol and bull. ‘‘It must be worth Rs 1 crore today,’’ says Sridhar.‘Bharat Bhagya Vidhata’, one of Hussain’s best, takes pride of place across the glass foyer. His depiction of post-independence modern India made it to TIFR in 1963, when Bhabha invited six artists to contend for an ambitious mural in the main building. Number 1 in the collection — a priceless 1952 still life in watercolour by G M Hazarnis — though, hangs in the director’s office.For all the pride in Bhabha’s patronage of the Progressive Art Group and the European Renaissance, though, there is still no catalogue recording the history of these oils and watercolours. But perhaps that’s why it doesn’t surprise when in the tiniest musty corner, the dust is rubbed away to reveal the legend: Sculpture with compliments of Fidel Castro, 1983.
