The Sign of 50

AS apocryphal stories go, this one’s pretty neat. It was the early 1980s, and the feisty LP Sihare was director of the National Gallery...

AS apocryphal stories go, this one’s pretty neat. It was the early 1980s, and the feisty LP Sihare was director of the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) in New Delhi. The museum was planning an exhibition of a major European sculptor, but the country in question wanted to send only replicas of his works to India. ‘‘This was common,’’ says a Delhi-based art historian. ‘‘Western governments would demand originals of even our rarest works, but would want to send us duplicates, on the grounds that India has questionable storage facilities.’’

Sihare would have none of it. He even sent back some packages from the airport when he discovered that they were not the real thing. In the end, he got what he wanted.

Wonder what he would have said if he were around today. Though NGMA was opened on March 29, 1954, the golden jubilee celebrations have been on hold for seven months because of the change in the central government. Tomorrow, the curtain rises on a year-long party with the opening of the exhibition ‘The Signposts of the Times—The Golden Trail from 1954 to 2004’.

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There is as much to celebrate as to contemplate. When NGMA was inaugurated by then Vice President S Radhakrishnan, it had 200 works of art. Today, the collection includes 16,000 paintings, sculptures, graphics and photographs.

Through the decades, the gallery has hosted exhibitions of numerous international legends—Auguste Rodin, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Pablo Picasso.

But like most government-run repositories of culture, it has often been held back by its own patrons. ‘‘There is a need for more professionally curated exhibitions of contemporary Indian art, conceptualised by qualified art critics and historians,’’ says Jyotindra Jain, professor of art at Jawaharlal Nehru University. ‘‘A meaningful exhibition would take at least two to three years of curatorial work on the concept, research, selection of works, loans, display. Are we doing this?’’

CALENDAR ART

• The opening exhibition of the NGMA’s jubilee celebrations will be inaugurated by President APJ Abdul Kalam
• The gallery will roll out 300 works from its permanent collection, covering Raja Ravi Varma, Amrita Sher-Gil, MF Husain and his contemporaries
• The NGMA is also initiating a pilot project through which prints of the Sher-Gil and Rabindranath Tagore collections will be available
• The ‘Signposts’ exhibition will be on till December 12. Another series of programmes—up to November 2005—will include retrospectives of Tyeb Mehta and Satish Gujral, and what director Rajeev Lochan describes as ‘‘some international artists’’

Work on ‘Signposts’ began just six months ago. Besides, the NGMA’s Rs 4 crore outlay for the year is the cost of a small-budget Hindi film these days.

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The gallery’s focus has been restricted to buyable, preservable art, and it has yet to acknowledge newer practices such as video installations. ‘‘We will, we will,’’ assures NGMA director Rajeev Lochan. ‘‘We’re gearing up for such things as installation and performance art.’’

Lochan is a painter, but not all NGMA honchos have been artists. From 1994 to 2001, bureaucrats held the job. Ironically, at the 1949 Kolkata art conference where Maulana Abul Kalam Azad planted the idea for the NGMA, he had said, ‘‘Excellence in art … can be properly appreciated only by those who have in them the same excellence.’’

Did he mean the babu?