Rashid Rana, 2010

I am including this essay about Rashid Rana in Conversations though it contains no quotes from the artist, because substantial portions of the text are based on Rashid's account of his development. The piece appeared in 2010 in a book published jointly by Chemould and Chatterjee & Lal. Originally, I was to offer a personal interpretation of Rashid's work, but when it became apparent that none of the writers was covering the entirety of his career, he requested me to take on that task. I hesitated, because there was so much he had created that I hadn't seen, but he said a long interview would fill the holes. The conversation was delayed by weeks as he travelled to Paris for work on an upcoming show at the Musée Guimet. Ultimately, he transferred a PowerPoint presentation containing about 200 images, and talked me through it in the course of an enlightening three-hour Skype conversation between Lahore and Bombay.
Reading the essay now, it feels in need of breathing room. The original brief was for a 2000 word piece and, though the assignment's nature changed, I didn't want to go over that limit by too much (I overshot by 50% in the end). Producing a 5000 word whopper risked unbalancing the volume and crowding other contributors, among whom were friends like Kavita Singh and Quddus Mirza.
Still, the slightly cramped narrative aside, it's a reasonably good skeletal account of Rashid's trajectory from 1991 to 2010.

SEEING DOUBLE

On 18th October 2007, Rashid Rana switched on the television to watch a broadcast of Benazir Bhutto’s homecoming. Her return to a frenzied welcome after an eight year exile brought hopes of a brighter future for Pakistan. As Bhutto’s parade wound slowly through the streets of Karachi, Rana left for a slaughterhouse in his home town Lahore. The abattoir revolted him, but eventually he was able to focus on his task: taking pictures of animals being led to the knife; kids lying with their throats slit; blood pooling on the floor; and carcasses being readied for the kitchen. That night, suicide bombers struck Bhutto’s convoy, leaving 136 dead, three times as many injured, and turning the artwork he was planning, an ornate Pakistani-Persian carpet composed from photographs of violent killing, into an unnervingly prescient conception.
The opposition between beauty and death integral to Rana’s Red Carpet series has been explored by generations of artists, and sometimes overturned. The Symbolists, at their most decadent, replaced truth with death in Keats’ paradigm, asserting that beauty was death, and death, beauty. In our own time, we have grown familiar with that dazzling marker of our last end, Damien Hirst’s diamond skull, produced in the same year as the first Red Carpet. Rana’s take on the theme accords with his practice of first engaging viewers with iconic, picturesque or monumental images and then revealing these easily recognised and digested views to be constituted of mundane, gruesome or explicitly sexual details. He sets up contrasts that sometimes appear simplistic, but possess an undercurrent of signification, one usually related to the conditions and confusions of the subcontinent, that destabilises categories which seem mutually exclusive.
The photomosaic and the carpet share the property of elaborateness, though one is crafted with the help of high-end software and the other through a painstaking technique barely changed for millennia. Our curiosity about the manner of the print’s manufacture leads us to consider the same for the carpet it depicts. This brings to mind the fact that carpet weavers and butchers aren’t that far apart: they ply traditional trades and mostly struggle to make ends meet. Such interplay between the big picture, its components, and the nature of their creation, breaks down an initially perceived stark opposition into a complex pattern of relationships, differentiating the image from, say, photomosaics of George Bush made from visages of dead US soldiers. Those are startling and effective in their own right, but not amenable to interpretation beyond the immediately obvious.
Rana’s dialectical compositions hinge upon a series of binaries: time versus space; two dimensions versus three; conceptual versus political; wholeness versus fragmentation; handmade versus machinemade; abstraction versus Pop; and artifice versus illusionism, to enumerate the most persistent. His earliest mature works, created at the Massachusetts College of Art where he studied after gaining a degree from Lahore’s National College of Art, were austere compositions of vertical and horizontal lines of varying thickness. His professors saw a belated homage to that arch-modernist form, the abstract grid, but Rana intended an echo of bar codes on the one hand, and, on the other, a reconciliation of Islamicate geometric, symmetrical rendition with the concerns of post-War American art. In the latter pursuit, he was following his teacher from NCA, Zahoor ul Akhlaq, one of the moving forces behind the renewed attention paid to miniatures in the 1980s and 90s. The neo-miniaturists, who became the best-known representatives of Pakistani art by the end of that period, adapted the decorative delicacy of Mughal art to contemporary subject matter, but Akhlaq’s own paintings were more intellectually distanced than theirs. The synthesist side of his search, which the neo-miniaturists largely ignored, was taken up and brought to fruition by Rana. This came to pass, however, when the guru was no longer present to witness his disciple’s achievement. In 1999, Zahoor ul Akhlaq, the gentlest of men in the account of all who knew him, was shot dead in his own home by a distant acquaintance. The killer first fired at the painter’s daughter Jahanara, and then three others, for reasons never made fully clear, though professional jealousy had some role to play. The impact of those gunshots on Rana’s later work, while unquantifiable, cannot have been negligible.
The artist’s contribution to a show mounted as tribute to the fallen professor was a piece of wrapping paper, a generic floral print, stuck on board. A painting made soon after, Love is Eternal for as Long as it Lasts, contained a similar grid of roses smudged in the brushing so as to recall bullet wounds. Beauty and death. Rana’s use of commonplace kitsch to express profound personal sentiments was his first public engagement with the possibilities of Pop. While the neo-miniaturists ruled Lahore, Pop flourished in Karachi through the work of Elizabeth and Iftikhar Dadi, Durriya Kazi and David Alesworth. Their efforts bolstered Rana’s resolve to let found images seep onto his painting and sculpture. He drew on childhood memories of the movies, whether broadcasts of Hindi films which could be seen in areas of Pakistan near India, or made-in-Lahore productions. As his work began to access more of the world, it became more accessible itself.
In 2000, he presented a series of canvases, interrogations of machismo, centered on negative images (in the formal sense of tonal inversion and colour reversal) from Pakistani movies. The two most significant works produced that year, though, had no connection with cinema. What is so Pakistani about this Painting and Who is Afraid of Red, possessed a defiant irony encapsulated by their titles. The first was divided into three sections, with the left and right showing a positive and negative copy of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s The Dance, randomly appropriated as a signifier of academic art history. Between Carpeaux’s gambolling nude figures was a piece of fabric with a flowery print, chosen in the Duchampian manner, with a total absence of good or bad taste. The only things definitively Pakistani about the work were its visualiser, and the prominent title painted upon it, part English and part Urdu transliteration, questioning the impulse to slot art by nationality.
The artist was to return to the theme of Pakistaniness four years later, through A Day in the Life of Landscape, a mosaic print in which photographs of urban traffic and crowded streetsides combined to create a vista of the sort favoured by members of the Punjab Landscape School. The landscapists, led by Khalid Iqbal, frequently painted perspectives of semi-rural areas on Lahore’s outskirts, where panning a few degrees left or right would ruin the idyll. Rana’s montage brought in everything they were intent on leaving out. The derivative of French Impressionism that Iqbal and his acolytes purveyed, normalised as authentically Punjabi, was not just an import, but a greatly attenuated one. The best Impressionist paintings, particularly those by the movement’s foremost exponent Claude Monet, involve a significant shift when seen close up, a dissolution of topography into abstract daubs and swirls of colour. Though Rana’s photomontages are resolutely representational, the shift between the long view and close up arguably allies them with impressionism at a level deeper than that achieved by the Lahore landscapists. The frozen moments in the cameos also relate to an Impressionist ideal of capturing an instant in time. This buried genealogy adds a typical, art historically loaded layer of irony to the debate about identity generated by A Day in the Life of Landscape.
Who Is Afraid of Red, which referenced Barnett Newman’s magisterial series of canvases, Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue?, consisted of a length of rich red fabric embroidered with an Urdu transliteration of the title and flanked by two halves of Rana’s wedding Sherwani. The work treated personal trauma, in this case the artist’s separation, in a considerably more sophisticated manner than his memorial piece for Zahoor ul Akhlaq, signalling how far he had progressed in one year.
In 2002, he created his first photomosaic, titled I Love Miniatures. Snippets from advertisements were carefully put together, without the aid of the sophisticated software he would later discover, creating a profile of the Mughal prince Khurram. Though the title sounded flippant, the artist must have felt keenly his outlier status. With conventional painters like the Lahore landscapists popular at home, and neo-miniaturists dominant abroad, there seemed no place for his kind of complex negotiation of identities. The mood of the world, however, was changing, thanks to two fallen New York towers. Conservatives embraced Samuel Huntington’s idea that civilisations are in constant conflict motivated by essential differences. In response, the Left gradually abandoned extreme cultural relativist positions and began emphasising common ground between societies. Where international curators and collectors had sought culture specific creations representing something akin to a different language, they now grew interested in cosmopolitan styles inflected with local dialects. The two subcontinental artists whose work possessed the perfect balance of local and global at that moment were Rana and India’s Subodh Gupta, and they were to lead the unprecedented boom in contemporary art of the subsequent years.

2

If Rana’s mosaics are usually about opposites revealed on deeper examination to be co-existing realities, a reverse movement occurs in his pictures of twins in irreconcilable conflict. In the Middle of Nowhere, completed just before I Love Miniatures inaugurated this theme, a natural extension of his interest in symmetry. The artist himself is posed, almost naked, holding the slumped body of a fully clad doppelganger, against a sylvan landscape adapted from photo studio backdrops and Pakistani truck painting. It was first exhibited as part of Aar Paar, a collaboration between Indian and Pakistani artists, the context heightening its allusion to the rivalry over the Kashmir Valley which has bedeviled relations between the neighbouring nations since they split apart. “No war is a war until a brother kills his brother”, says the arms dealer Marko in the Serbian director Emir Kusturica’s epic film, Underground. Rana’s twins take that bitter logic a step further.
Ten Differences (2004) was a short, looped video, its single frame split laterally. The artist’s persona entered at both ends, pointed a gun, fired, was himself shot, and fell back dead. One side of the mirror image lagged the other by a few frames, giving the duel the feel of a proper narrative. The two channel video Meeting Point (2006) obliquely referenced the September 11 attacks, showing identical airliners, projected on adjacent walls, seemingly about to crash into each other. A loud jet engine roar and animated lines behind the planes provided an illusion of movement, but the machines stayed suspended in their sectors, perpetually deferring the expected collision. Rana added a kinaesthetic dimension to visual and aural illusion in the gigantic Departure Lounge, installed within Singapore’s City Hall as part of the 2006 Biennale. The building, slated for conversion into an art museum, had witnessed the Japanese general Itakagi’s surrender to Lord Mountbatten in 1945. Lee Kuan Yew had announced Singapore’s final separation from Malaysia there, unfurling the nation’s flag as the new national anthem played. Rana aimed to evoke reverberations of such large historical events without direct allusion. A six channel video of an airplane’s wings was projected on facing walls; they appeared to turn constantly rightwards, taking along the entire hall and those inside it.
While the employment of illusions broadens the appeal of Rana’s creations, he ensures they are subordinated to coherent ideas. The same is true of his citations of pop culture artefacts. In the photomosaic When He Said I Do, He Did Not Say What He Did (2004), two heavily armed Arnold Schwarzeneggers stalk an unseen enemy against a calm grassy plain stretching to a line of mountains in the distance. The landscape is laterally inverted, but the Schwarzenegger figures are not, nor are the tiny details, drawn from media coverage of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. On the viewer’s approach, the landscape flattens out, as if moving from traditional recessive depth to early modernist rejections of perspective. Illusionistic space is entirely eliminated when the miniature battle scenes become clearly visible. Geopolitical and formal enquiries unravel side by side, even as the playful Hollywood borrowing prevents the implied association between militaristic cinema and real militarism from hardening into overt statement.
Offshore Accounts – 1 (2006), a seascape composited from pictures of sailing ships and landfills, is set in a purpose-built niche, widening as it gets closer to the corner, giving the impression of a flat, perfectly rectangular composition when seen from a distance. Rana’s most ambitious optical illusion was See Through, a site-specific project created at the Manchester Art Gallery in 2006. On the high glass doorway of the institution, the artist pasted photographs, printed on Dura-film to eliminate cast shadows, of the immediate exterior of the gallery. Seen from a certain spot in the atrium, the print perfectly simulated the pediments and columns of the buildings outside, but detached itself to become a ghost image when viewed from other points. Up close, it was revealed to be composed of cheek-by-jowl edifices of Lahore. Both Offshore Accounts - 1 and See Through dealt with postcolonial themes. The former, perhaps the artist’s most explicit averment, sided with influential critiques of neo-liberalism in tying the history of imperialism to the wastefulness and environmental decay associated with modern consumer society. The latter, less manifestly political, evoked issues of cultural exchange, of migration to and from the subcontinent.
Rana had employed architectural motifs before See Through, but at this time the subject took on a new prominence. Two-dimensions and Twins (both 2007) presented the front elevations of high rises, marking a return to the abstract grid he had investigated in the early 1990s. Pakistani buildings may have compared unfavourably with European ones in See Through, but the vignettes from Lahore’s streets used in Two-dimensions and Twins felt imbued with character, in refreshing contrast to the forbidding facades of the concrete, steel and glass towers. In the Dis-Location series (2007-08), colonial era buildings from Lahore were paired with stills taken at different times of day and night around the same spot, adding the dimension of time to space, and sparking a dialogue between built form and use value. The series raised a number of questions: What precisely was the dislocation being cited? Was it situated in the form of architecture, imposed in a region unsuited for it? Conversely, was the aural and visual noise of the surroundings a betrayal of the sophisticated planning that went into the buildings and roads? Or was it the time that was out of joint?
Rana has noticed that viewers who are not part of the art world spend far longer scrutinising his photomontages than insiders, who frequently move on, with an I-get-the-idea attitude, after a cursory look. Desperately Seeking Paradise (2007-08), though, demanded careful attention from all who confronted it. A stainless steel cube with sides nine feet across, it was equipped with vertical slats placed aslant to reflect the environment from certain angles, and, from others, to let spectators look in on images of tower blocks and low-rises pasted on the surfaces. The shape of the structure, and the circumambulation required to absorb its contents, was suggestive of the Kaaba, a site adored by Muslim seekers of paradise, desperate or not.
The artist believes in a serial monogamy of styles, but in the years between 2006 and 2008 he turned polygynous. A new entrant to his zenana was a form of photosculpture made by glueing all-round views of objects onto acrylic boxes. The Stove was a pixilated image of a stove stuck somewhat perversely on a box the size and shape of a stove. Pixilation, associated with movement, was here employed for the humdrum and the static. Plastic Flowers in a Traditional Vase replaced the undulations of chinaware with the geometry of two acrylic cubes. The pattern on the vase was retained precisely in the transfer, while the flowers were pixilated to the point of unrecognisability. Through these manoeuvres, Rana was taking on an entire history of representation. One-point perspective attempted to translate three dimensions into two through the illusion of depth. At the climax of the modernist revolt, Cubism posited a radically different approach to capturing all-round views onto a plane, but lost the sense of embodiedness in the process. Rana’s Plastic Flowers were a wry and elegant comment on that impossible but enduring impulse to depict the totality of objects. They marked a return to formalist exploration, but a return accomplished concurrently with the visceral Red Carpet and the flamboyant Desperately Seeking Paradise.
By early 2008, after years of hectic and rewarding creation, the artist was in demand in a fashion he could scarcely have dreamed possible at the turn of the century. He was in the process of putting together a final, gigantic Red Carpet, when he stopped. He gave up on that photomosaic, halted his other projects, and took a break from an art circuit grown delirious. Through the years, he had retained his commitment to teaching, and now gave his students the time and attention they craved. A few months later, the markets collapsed, leading to a period of fear and trembling before a measure of sanity returned to the world.
The break didn’t alter Rana’s central concerns, but his recent digital C-prints demonstrate a more straightforward engagement with art’s history and with political violence than he previously ventured. In Origins and the series What Lies Between Flesh and Blood, he conjures up adaptations of Rothko and Courbet from wounds and goose pimples. In Transposing, death turns into arousal through the mediation of the pixel. Instance-Anatomy has fragments of bodies becoming fragments of photograph. No film heroes, Edwardian buildings, carpets or seascapes beguile the eyes of the uninitiated, and there’s little playful irony to take the edge off graphic and pornographic images. This is not art for anybody who’s afraid of red.

Sudhir Patwardhan, 2001

I am a huge admirer of Sudhir Patwardhan, the painter and the person. His remarks on art -- his own and that of others -- combine lucidity and depth in equal measure. For this interview, published in Art India in late 2001 or early 2002, we spoke about two paintings that rank among his greatest achievements.

Sudhir Patwardhan: At the Edge of Conception and Perception

Two monumental canvases dominate Sudhir Patwardhan’s new solo exhibition at Sakshi gallery. Ulhasnagar, a four-panel panorama, traces the path of a river as it curves past an industrial township on the outskirts of Bombay. Lower Parel, which portrays the city’s erstwhile industrial heartland, contains three structures: a bridge in the foreground, one of Bombay’s inoperational mills immediately behind it, and a high-rise building in the distance. The river in Ulhasnagar appears to traverse different times of day in the course of its journey. In contrast, Lower Parel gives the impression of one moment frozen in its tracks. These two large paintings are accompanied by a number of charcoal drawings, studies of figures later incorporated into the large works. Patwardhan spoke about his new paintings at his studio in Thane.

Panoramic painting relates to the idea of the picturesque. Were you conscious of working within, or against, this tradition while painting Ulhasnagar?

I suppose there is another kind of panorama, Altdorfer’s visions of battlefields and some paintings of Brueghel. Brueghel’s Tower of Babel was very much in my mind while painting the central section of Ulhasnagar. But the picturesque is something that attracts me very much, particularly the works of Poussin and Lorraine, their use of light.

Can you speak a little about the origin and development of the image in Ulhasnagar?

The Ambernath-Ulhasnagar belt is a very different kind of industrial landscape from what we find in the city proper. You see a lot of greenery there, but also scattered industrial structures. The experience of seeing this landscape was with me for many years but I wasn’t sure what it actually meant. When one tries to use such an experience as an anchor around which to create art, one suggests a meaning to that experience that takes it beyond just the local. And one brings in other elements, it could be the light in certain Venetian landscapes, for example. So the painting is always something different from the experience but, if it is successful, something of that original experience will be captured in it. The particulars one brings in will prevent the experience from evaporating into a generalisation. That’s the balance I wanted to maintain.

In the second panel from the left, there’s a kind of ripple painted using a bold, expressionistic red. It draws one’s attention immediately. What led you to choose this colour?

There are actual streams you see in places like Ulhasnagar where the pollutants discharged into the water give it a weird colour. In one way these polluted streams form extremely attractive sights. On the other hand we are also conscious about the fishes dying in the water as a result of the effluents. Something similar happens when one sees a layer of heavily polluted air with clear sky extending above it, that’s an amazing sight. I’ve always been interested in this contradiction, and used it in that part of the painting which, in any case, represents the darker aspect of the landscape.

Did you conceive of four panels right from the start?

No, the idea evolved after I began my sketches and studies. I considered an evenly lit panorama to begin with, but then I felt that a movement from morning to evening in the light might work well. This tied in with the different stages of industrialism, starting with the non-industrialised periphery and moving to the dense built space in the centre. A kind of historical time is present in the painting as well.

Both Ulhasnagar and Lower Parel appear to be very confident works, confident in the validity of the medium. Have you moved beyond a period of doubt about the potential of painting?

If you are referring to my trying out media apart from simply paint, that was a phase when I needed to investigate whether there were limits to what painting could say, and whether I could overcome these limits by using other materials. But I increasingly feel that the medium is just that, a medium, and what you say, you say through it. The idea of the language or the medium defining what you can or cannot say has loosened for me. What I’m saying is a half-truth. Of course it matters to some extent what the medium is. But what I am certain about now, is that my own practice as a painter, and the personal as well as larger history of that practice, offers me a density which is more important to me than the variety offered by different media.

Like Ulhasnagar, Lower Parel also shows layers of historical time appearing in one frame, as indeed they do so often in India…

With Lower Parel, again, I was going back to an experience that has been with me for years. On the one hand it was the visual experience of those bridges -- not just the one at Lower Parel -- that had made a considerable impact. My early experience of the area in the 1970s was a charged one, there was a wholeness to it, provided by Marxist ideology. One knew the people there belonged to a certain class, that was part of the experience of seeing people, which gave it density. Later, that feeling gradually dissolved and one could no longer create the same sense of that place.
And yet there were things I wanted to paint there. I wanted to try and discover what was still alive from that initial experience and to make sense of the changed circumstances. At a basic level, just the architectural complexity of the bridges remained constant, of course, providing a starting point for the painting.

You speak about that early experience with a great deal of nostalgia, but no nostalgia clouds the work. I find that quite remarkable.

When I started the painting -- I wouldn’t call it nostalgia -- but there was a kind of anger in it, about all these skyscrapers coming up and displacing what existed before. The figures, too, had a stressed-out look to them. But I felt a definite false note there. I had wanted to make the painting dramatic, with the dying mill in the centre, but none of it was working. I actually re-did the sky more than twenty times. It seems a simple, clear sky now, but I was stuck with the original idea for a long time.
Also, the figures just did not seem right. In a way this was a continuation of an old problem I’d faced for the last ten years, that the figure sometimes tended to stand for something, it came down as a sign rather than a fact. Before this crisis, however distorted my figures were, I used to feel there was a factuality about them. In painting Lower Parel, for the first time I started using photographs as a basis for the people in the painting. This created its own problems, I had to escape from the particularity of the people in the photographs, so that the figures in the painting related to each other, held together as a group.

Did your ideas about this part of Bombay change as the painting progressed?

I realise that many of the people one now sees in Lower Parel, often sons and daughters of mill-workers, are trying to make the best of the changes which have taken place in Bombay, and the new opportunities these provide. I think there is no going back on those changes, apart from a few piece-meal measures that might be possible. I don’t believe what’s happening is such a terrible thing.

Is the act of painting itself, for you, a way of coming to terms?

The act of coming to this studio, to work regularly is very important for me, I feel uneasy if there’s a gap in the habit of painting for any reason. At that level, I’d say yes. But I’m not sure whether painting allows me to discover something about myself, of which I was earlier unaware. Coming to terms occurs at different levels, some of these prior to the act of painting.

You spoke of using photography for the first time as a basis for your figuration. Many painters in India today are using photography-based and photo-related imagery, often in a hyper-realist style. How do you place yourself in this context?

I am interested in art where there is a tension between the act of painting and the image being painted. A lot of photography-related painting being done today is conceptually oriented, where the image relates mainly to other images. These paintings can work, provided the concepts underpinning them are complex and rich. But I am interested in painting things that I can see, and in painting them as I see them. In this respect Cézanne has always been a touchstone for me, particularly the relationship between the mind, eye and hand in his work. He painted at the edge of conception and perception, and that’s important for me, it’s what I aim to do.

Subodh Gupta: January 2007

In late 2006, Sangita Jindal, who owns Art India magazine, launched Arre, a peculiarly named publication that lasted just two issues (or was it three?). Though I wasn't keen on the content or design of the journal, my Art India connection meant I could hardly refuse to write for it. Zehra Jumabhoy and I had interviewed Subodh Gupta as part of a project that was later aborted, and I wanted to use the material before it grew dated. I therefore offered Arre a profile of Subodh based on that interview, and I believe it turned out rather well. Since nobody bought the magazine, the article remained unread, but I did manage to use bits of the piece in other writing and in lectures, so the effort wasn't entirely wasted.

Subodh Gupta

Subodh Gupta is 42 and lives in a high rise in Gurgaon with his wife Bharti Kher and their two children, having moved six years ago from a modest flat in Mayur Vihar. Although barely known outside the small art community, he’s an international star, as his recent track record demonstrates. In 2005, he showed at the Venice Biennale and London’s Frieze art fair, and had solos at Sakshi Gallery in Bombay, the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York and Gallery inSITU in Paris. In January 2006, he was among eight nominees for Cardiff’s prestigious Artes Mundi Visual Arts Prize. Three months later, an untitled painting by him sold for 80 lakh rupees at auction. The same Saffronart sale saw a collector pay 60 lakh for Two Cows, an aluminium, bronze and chrome sculpture of bicycles slung with milk pails, one of an edition of three. In June that year Subodh made an impact at the world’s largest art fair, Art Basel, with Across Seven Seas, which consisted of cast aluminium luggage items moving endlessly round an airport carousel. That piece, displayed by the Geneva-based Art & Public, was snapped up for just short of a million dollars. He rounded out a bumper year with showings in Paris and Lille, and at the massive Arario gallery in Beijing.
It is improbable enough that such success would visit a boy from Khagaul in Bihar whose enthusiasm for painting led to a BFA from Patna’s College of Arts and Crafts. The story’s even more unlikely considering that, little over a decade ago, few credited him with being one of Delhi’s outstanding young artists. Subodh admits his beginnings in the art world were not promising. “When I first came to Delhi, I was making some good paintings, but also a lot of crap stuff. But I was selling it. Meeting Bharti changed everything. She told me, ‘Subodh what you’re creating is no good’. I realized that if I continued to do what I was doing, I might sell, maybe even make a name, but I wouldn’t be doing myself justice.” He attempted to change his style and, in the process, lost what patronage he’d enjoyed. “For two years, 1994 and 1995, I put out really bad work. It was a frustrating period. Galleries stopped taking my paintings, I was totally lost.” He eventually found a way out of the slump by creating an installation called 29 Mornings which used low wooden seats, or patlas, with a variety of objects placed or painted on them. These objects, such as a length of folded red cloth, burnt wood, an umbrella, coins and a torch were connected with nostalgic memories or associable with Hindu mourning rituals.
Installation art was a novelty at the time, having sailed in with the tide of globalisation which also brought to India Subodh’s future wife, an artist who’d spent her early years in the UK, and his future dealer Peter Nagy, who had established a name in the New York art scene at a remarkably young age, before briefly losing his groove and deciding to start afresh in Delhi, helping build the nascent market for experimental art. Few Indian collectors were buying installations then, but new avenues had opened up in the form of international biennials, workshops and residencies which favoured explorations outside traditional painting and sculpture. Whereas, in previous decades, Indian representation in shows abroad would be decided by the official state fine arts council, the Lalit Kala Akademi, artists were now contacted directly by independent curators at the helm of international displays.
Subodh flourished on the workshop-residency-biennial circuit dominated by new media art and installation, the latter often site specific and perishable. He set himself apart through a use of organic materials intrinsic to Indian culture, notably cowdung. My Mother and Me, which he constructed in 1997 during a workshop conducted by the Khoj Artists' Association workshop at Modinagar near Delhi, was a cylindrical structure ten feet high made from cowpats. A layer of ash on the floor inside added to the feeling of being in a space connected with ritual. He was painting as well, and his images were now simpler, more direct. Three canvases of cows shown at Bombay’s Gallery Chemould in 1999 had a coating of dung as their background. There was also a self-portrait, underneath which small red lights spelt the word ‘Bihari’ in Devanagari script. If this image ironised the stereotyping of his home state and its citizens, the show’s centrepiece, titled The Way Home, indicated that some of those stereotypes weren’t far off the mark. Consisting of a cow sculpture surrounded by plates and glasses, among which were casually strewn replicas of country made revolvers, the installation suggested that crime and violence had become part of daily life in Bihar.
Looking back on The Way Home, it comes across as an important transitional work. It was composed, perhaps, of too many elements, a contrast with the spareness that Subodh had found in his paintings, and would soon achieve in sculpture. The cow at the centre linked with the artist’s previous output, which evoked an Indianness conceived around tradition, ritual, family and a pre-industrial lifestyle. The Way Home was made, however, from non-organic materials: fibreglass and stainless steel. Over the next few years, he shifted to working with corrosion resistant steel and aluminium rather than cowdung, cloth, ash and wood. In the process, he envisioned a different kind of identity, one that was modern but inflected in distinctively Indian ways, an identity predicated upon class, caste, migration and consumption.
Was The Way Home, then, the first sign of a move away from home as a source of inspiration? Not quite, because the town of his birth contained features relating to Subodh’s early installations as well as his later sculptures. In an otherwise insightful essay in the July 1998 issue of Art India, Roobina Karode referred to Khagaul as “a small remote village”. It isn’t really that. Khagaul and its twin Danapur are a short train ride from Patna. Danapur was one of the earliest British cantonments in the country and is one of the divisional headquarters of Indian Railways. Most of the inhabitants of Khagaul work for the railways, including many of Subodh’s relatives. He says of his home, “Due to the railway, it was more than just any small town. We had two swimming pools, and people used to go to the club, which had a billiards room. The railway cinema screened English movies every morning. And there were lots of art activities; no less than seven theatre groups were based there.” His childhood memories are at least as much about sleek tracks and locomotives as about cows and dung-smeared walls.
In stainless steel, Subodh settled upon a material which evoked a common set of associations across the country. His paintings of shops displaying shiny pots and pans played on these associations. “I use materials that are connected with collective memory”, he explains. “I remember when I was in school, stainless steel was so desirable, to eat on it at an uncle’s house was the height of luxury. It was more expensive than brass at that time.” The alloy has become cheaper and gone down market since then, but also attracts the interest of high end designers, as it has intermittently done since the heyday of art deco. A range of class associations therefore comes into play when responding to one of Subodh’s sculptural pieces or paintings.
The fact that stainless steel in Indian homes relates to cooking, eating and bathing brings in notions of ritual purity and impurity connected with caste. He attempted to explore these concepts through an exhibition titled Jootha in 2005. A row of kitchen sinks stood along a wall accompanied by an audio track of metal dishes being washed. There was also a video of guests at a reception gorging themselves. If Jootha wasn’t entirely successful it could be because it adhered too closely to what it represented. Subodh likes the objects he uses to be “the same, but not the same” when displayed. It’s a difficult balance to maintain, and his kitchen sinks looked too much like plain old kitchen sinks to be carriers of any larger idea. A series of wall mounted dish racks titled Curry was better actualized, the gleaming array of thalis seductive enough to entice even the most affluent spectators.
If the artist’s stainless steel pieces revolved around domesticity, his sculptures in aluminium created in the same period explored the world of commuting and migrant labour. He had casts made of luggage typically carried by workers returning from the Gulf, and placed these on trolleys cast in bronze. A cloth bundle elaborately tied with string came to look like a precious object in its sculptural version. The metamorphosis was appropriate given how much the contents of such packages meant to the owners. As Subodh describes his encounters with these returnees, it is apparent the mid-air meetings made a deep impression on him. “Sometimes I have taken the route via the Gulf on my way back from Europe. The kind of people who sit next to you after you change at Dubai, they are your people – but different. I’d talk to them, tailors, bus-drivers, building workers, cooks. The luggage they’d have, it was so colourful, the suitcases, the bundles tied with string. And when you see that, your emotions get stirred. Come on, they work so hard, and look at the way they tie those bundles! What must they be carrying? Some cash, a radio, some gifts… whatever it is, they tighten it so hard, no normal person can open it.” He made paintings around this theme too, snapshot images of men with their backs to the viewer, or only their torsos visible, loading packed TV sets onto carriers of ambassador taxis. Men whose sense of self-worth was contained in what they had brought back for family and friends from the Emirates, from Oman, from Bahrain. Men who were the lowest of the low where they worked but gained status in their community back home by buying rare branded goods.
While Subodh’s art has always had a political dimension, it has never seemed committed to an ideology. Freedom from dogma was crucial in the creation of his gulf worker series. Politically oriented Indian artists – and there are many of them working in media art and installation – tend to view with suspicion any kind of attraction to commodities, categorising it as a form of false consciousness. When they take up subjects like migrant labour, the result is images of pure victimhood. Subodh focussed on the desires of the subalterns, so to speak, and showed how the poignancy of their lives was most visible precisely in the fulfillment, however partial, of those desires.
The shift in expression seen in his work following The Way Home came at a propitious moment. During the nineties, many among the art world’s intellectual elite had glorified local cultures and traditional ways of living as a profoundly important antithesis of the homogenising impulse of globalisation. After the World Trade Center towers collapsed, this extreme multiculturalist perspective also began to crumble. Curatorial tastes moved away from the previous valorisation of ethnic, organic art to a preference for a less exotic look. Subodh’s work was composed of precisely the right mix of similarity and difference. He made sculptures of Vespa scooters and Ambassador cars, vehicles which, while still common on the roads of twenty-first century India, had acquired a niche, retro-chic quality in Europe. When he turned to the natural world, it was to create ironic transpositions similar to what he did with luggage: making the humble look precious. He placed before viewers an aluminium wicker basket holding bronze cowpats; or ‘Colgate’, a silvery copy of sticks used in Indian villages for cleaning teeth. An additional level of irony was provided by the extraordinary prices at which these sold.
By 2005, even as he was poised for take-off internationally, his work was at a crossroads. The bicycles and scooters, the bartans and dish racks, appeared a little played out. The manner in which he moved to a new stage illustrates very well his mode of imagining. 2004 had begun with a catastrophic tsunami, and 2005 produced the Bombay deluge and the breached levees of New Orleans. He responded by making a dramatic car sculpture, Everything Is Inside. It consisted of a taxi, cast metal luggage on its carrier, its bottom half cut off so it looked as if it had sunk into the ground. Or was being overwhelmed by rising water.
Seized of the flood theme, he created a series titled Hungry God which looked entirely different from anything he’d done before. The stainless steel pots and pans were back, representing not goods to be coveted but possessions washed away. An installation in a church in Lille had vessels pouring into the centre from every surrounding niche, choking off escape routes. Another in the series was installed for twenty-four hours in a Parisian church in October 2006, part of an all-night arts festival called Les Nuits Blanche. It was bought by Francois Pinault, one of France’s richest men and owner of Christie’s auction house. A giant skull made out of utensils, the sculpture related to the venerable Christian tradition of the memento mori, as well as modern special effects extravaganzas like The Mummy. Subodh had managed to take a ubiquitous symbol and make it meaningful anew, an enormously difficult task that could only have been accomplished by a consummate artist.

(The interview with Subodh Gupta was conducted in conjunction with Zehra Jumabhoy, who also transcribed it)

Jitish Kallat, January 1998

I've written more articles about Jitish Kallat than about any other artist, and this was the first, a profile that appeared in Art India in 1998. It might well be the first thing published about Jitish, though maybe a couple of papers had carried short reviews of his maiden solo.
At the time, it seemed Jitish's success was a harbinger of a new era in which a number of very young artists would break into the big league. Recent graduates did receive more opportunities to exhibit in the noughties, but I suspect this remains the only profile of a twenty-three year old in an Indian art journal.
When Jitish read the draft I sent across, he expressed discomfort with the quote about feminism and my focus on phallic imagery. I don't recall if the quote was changed in the published version, and can't find that issue of Art India to check. If the line was retained, it's the only politically incorrect public pronouncement Jitish has made. But he has deniability, since I've lost the tape of our interview.
The Web was a novelty at the time, and required explanations that appear redundant today. The document on my computer begins ATTENTION ANUPA, NALINI, meaning it was faxed to the magazine office and re-typed, rather than emailed. I've altered some of the really clumsy phrases in the draft, but there are too many of those to rework without changing what character the piece has.

The Profile

Jitish Kallat’s debut solo exhibition, P.T.O., displayed recently in two Bombay galleries, was also placed on the Internet. The virtual paintings had a washed-out feel, retaining little of the quality of the originals. Perhaps this was a deliberate effort to save on downloading time by lowering the resolution of the images; but it seemed like proof, if yet more proof were required, that Walter Benjamin was misguided in contending that mechanical (and, by extension, digital) reproduction would efface the ‘aura’ which original works of art traditionally possessed.
Paradoxically, the twenty-three year old Kallat’s work also reveals the continuing relevance (fallacious futurology apart) of Benjamin’s essay on the impact of technologies of image reproduction. His paintings freely use these, notably the camera and the photocopy machine. Running a sheet of paper repeatedly through a copier, he achieves an over-inked reproduction of the image he needs, usually a photograph of himself or a picture of an Indian monument. This copy is then rubbed onto the canvas, where it leaves an impression. “When I need an image of myself in perspective the process is lengthier”, he says. “In this case I take a photograph, photocopy and enlarge it, place it on the wall and shoot that from the required angle, then make a photocopy of this”, before transferring the image to canvas.
To add irony to paradox, while the canvases on the Net seem impoverished, the paintings themselves have a bruised and blistered, patched and peeled feel, very much like the walls and buildings of his city, Bombay. Kallat explains his journey to grittiness: “I use a lot of mixed materials – binders, textile powders – so my paint is always a little tacky. From early on I used glycerin and starch mixed with acrylic, and rubbed the paint off the surface with cloth. Now I use a blade or a knife for the thicker canvas surface.”
“From early on” may seem like a strange phrase in the mouth of such a young artist, but his work does reveal, very ‘early on’, a remarkable control over the material at hand. A little over four years ago he painted, for the first time, a self-portrait. It was accompanied by the slogan, ‘I am a potato’. The potato was a personal emblem, soon to be joined by the pedestal, the elephant, and the coconut tree. “By saying I was a potato I meant that I had eyes, and could see what others couldn’t.” Here, then, was an artist confident of his particular vision, but diffident enough, or aware enough of our unheroic age, to ironise his own ambition by encoding it within the bathetic symbol of a potato.
Donning the armour of self-deprecation, Kallat can venture into the most dangerous battlefields. Paintings like I Wish It Came with the Food I Eat and Believer Picture literally idolise the phallus. As he puts it, “the whole feminist retaliation against men has produced a kind of counter-retaliation in my mind.” Irony also allows for theatricality, allows the self to adopt the grandest of roles, to appear in the robes of the Buddha, or posterised like Che Guevara.
In a painting from P.T.O. called Guardian Column, “where the painter is a sort of protector of a whole tradition”, we see the same two sided, ironic vision of the artist, a phallic pillar juxtaposed with a photocopied temple. Invoking Benjamin once more, Kallat’s view of his cultural tradition, like that of many of his peers is derived almost entirely from books, from mechanical reproductions of the original cultural artefacts. Kallat’s achievement is that he has found a formal solution to this strange intellectual condition. His pilgrims carry haversacks, but their journeys lead them mainly through a jungle of art publications. Ajanta and Ellora, the palaces of Mysore, the gopuras of Tamil Nadu, the artist has never seen any of these. They are all part of an abstract tradition and receive correspondingly abstract representation in his work.
The elephant, native of Kallat’s home state Kerala, is, like temples and palaces, a symbol of tradition that the artist uses repeatedly, or, as he prefers to put it, “recycles”. In Son, You Can Always Feel Young, the protagonist holds an elephant on a string, but tradition turns out to be less a puppet than a hypnotic pendulum (Rather than depict the pendulum swing in a Futurist manner, the picture shows the protagonist being swayed). The title of the painting brings into the equation a more modern form of brain-washing – that of American pop psychology, the cult of the do-it-yourself book.
Opposed to the gullible figure of Son, You Can Always Feel Young is the bespectacled self-portrait, May What Is Threatened Not Become Fact. The presence of spectacles is a sign, in Kallat’s lexicon, of “the wise, viewing, non-blind self”. The monumental head at the centre of May What Is Threatened Not Become Fact strikes a more sombre note than most of the other paintings in P.T.O. But the canvas also recycles a couple of the artist’s favourite motifs, such as the elephant who, in this case, is toppled from his pedestal. Well-worn phrases such as ‘toppled from his pedestal’ and ‘expanding the mind’ are often evoked by Kallat’s work, and he admits that many of his images “are guided by texts and captions: well-known phrases, song-titles, which, if proclaimed, would be too direct. These are very simplistic, dry, dehydrated thoughts. I maintain them like that for convenience, like a store of canned ideas. They only come alive when I use them as images.” To put it another way, “I think images, but I store words.”
The close relationship of words, ideas and images is central to Kallat’s work. His titles, usually written on the canvas along with other stray phrases, tend to include playful puns (‘Bulb Fiction: Strange Enlightenments’, ‘When So Many Spectacles Happen I See-Saw’). It is hardly surprising, then, that the painter’s first models were advertisements, which traditionally combine clever copy with striking images. The sleight of hand performed by commercials is that they sell you a brand, while you have to buy the product. The brand is the fantasy, the product is banal and real. Jitish Kallat’s paintings, too, have a few tricks up their sleeve. They combine, within the same cluster of images, promise and denial, proclamations and recantations. But if you choose to buy the paintings, you can be certain that what you see is what you get.

Minal and Dinesh Vazirani

This interview appeared in Take on Art magazine in October 2011.

Dinesh and Minal Vazirani founded Saffronart during the dotcom boom, and have guided it through a number of peaks and troughs since then. They envisioned Saffronart as a Web-based vendor, retooled the business model to focus on auctions, and expanded to include physical exhibitions. They have recently diversified into auctioning real estate and jewellery. They answered my questions with candour and insight.

Girish: It is eleven years since Saffronart was founded. Could you mark the main stages of its development?

Minal: The first phase was about building awareness. Conducting transactions for art online was something new not only for India but anywhere in the world. We also reached out to the Indian diaspora, which didn’t have access to Indian art. There were very few good publications or curated exhibitions exhibited internationally at that time.

Dinesh: The next stage, I’d say, was just survival. We seriously considered shutting down Saffronart around 2003, because building awareness had entailed mounting big shows in places like Hong Kong, Singapore, New York and London, and that almost broke our back. Venture capital had pulled out after the dotcom bust, so there was no additional funding available. We took loans from my father, from banks, sold a substantial part of our personal collection, in order to stay afloat. But this was also an inflection point when the market as a whole started growing rapidly.

Minal: Yes, 2004 and 2005 were very important years for our growth. Saffronart had over 35% of the auction market at that time. Then, from 2006, there was a great deal more investment, more players came in, there was more interest from international auction houses, and it felt like the market was getting its own legs. It turned out to be short-lived, of course.

Dinesh: Interestingly, our most successful auction in these 11 years was in December 2006, when we garnered about 17 million dollars in one sale. So if you look at the market size, it was probably at its largest at that point. The following year, the market carried on at the same kind of level but there was no dramatic growth.

Girish: Prices for contemporary art rose substantially in the final phase of the boom, didn’t they?

Dinesh: That’s true. I think, though, that Indian galleries representing contemporary artists were too enamoured with the West. A lot of Indians wanting to buy art in those days would be told, Oh, the piece is going to this collection in Europe, or that museum. Gallerists sold to foreigners who posed as museum collectors but were actually dealers and traders. Whether it was Charles Saatchi, Frank Cohen or anyone else, their collections would all come back to the market at some point. When foreigners pulled out after the financial crisis, there was no Indian collector base left behind, which is why contemporary art has taken the biggest hit.

Girish: To continue with the phases, the third one was the boom…

Dinesh: For us, that was a period of consolidation. We expanded quite dramatically, established a space in London, a larger space in New York, planned one in Delhi. Of course, nobody expected what happened after the financial crisis, and since then we’ve been back to the survival stage again.

Girish: It’s been that bad?

Dinesh: It has, yes. If you look at the peak auction of 17 million in December 2006, and then at March 2009 which was a million and a half, that’s one tenth of the sale amount. We had the same overheads, we didn’t cut down our staff, we didn’t close our spaces. We were hopeful that the market would come back. But because so much buying was for investment, it’s been difficult to get buyers back, and have them collect for the right reason, which is to appreciate the aesthetic qualities of the art and hang it on walls rather than store it in garages.

Minal: I think one dramatic change, which hasn’t had an effect on the value of the market yet but is very important, has been the rise of Indians who are collecting with a view to institutionalise their collection. The museum Kiran Nadar has set up is a great example. Unfortunately, there’s no government incentive associated with arts-related philanthropy, no tax benefit or anything of that kind.

Girish: Since you mention government regulation, could you spell out for me what changes you’d like to see in that area?

Minal: One of the good things that’s happened is the reduction in sales tax for art transactions in West Bengal; it’s now 1%. I hope other states follow.

Dinesh: Import duty is an important concern. If a canvas is painted in India, acquired by somebody outside the country and then bought by an Indian, why should the duty be 17%? I think people should be encouraged to get cultural products back into India. If we have import duty, let’s have a nominal rate like in the UK and other nations.
The third thing I’d look at is changing the Antiquities Act. It’s killed trade, and because trade’s been killed, so has education and expertise. Today, most experts in Indian antiquities are in London or New York, there are hardly any left in India.

Minal: If you drive business underground, there’s no way you can build infrastructure. Unfortunately, the Direct Tax Code that’s coming in has a 1% annual wealth tax on the market value of one’s art collection.

Girish: You just criticised galleries for their Western fixation, but I’ve heard gallerists criticising you for undercutting prices. You began with a model where you worked through partner galleries, and then you became in a sense a competitor to galleries. Is there a lot of friction in the relationship currently?

Minal: We still work very closely with galleries and dealers, I don’t think that’s changed much. Even the exhibition spaces we have were conceived mainly to provide a plaform for galleries to showcase their artists through us.

Dinesh: There’s been some friction with a few galleries, for a simple reason. As an auction platform, our prices are dependent on the dynamic between buyer and seller. Whatever the price settles at is what it settles at. It’s fine when the market’s going up, because galleries keep marking their prices higher whenever the hammer price for an artist’s work rises in the secondary market. But when hammer prices fall below primary prices, galleries find it difficult to handle artists they represent. Artists ask, ‘How could Saffronart sell a painting at this price?’ And the gallerists accuse us of lowering prices. But we don’t raise or lower prices, the market does. I think perceptions have changed as the same thing has happened at Christie’s and Sotheby’s.

Girish: Would you say a bit about the role art funds played in the downturn? Obviously we couldn’t have avoided the crash, but Europe and the United States, which have such dreadful economies, have healthier art markets than we do today. Is the Indian market doing as badly as it is because art funds encouraged investors over collectors?

Dinesh: Every market needs different constituents. We need a strong base of collectors, and people with capital who will build the market, and also institutional buyers. So art funds are a legitimate constituent of the art market. I think what became detrimental was the volume of capital that they controlled in a small market. The auction market peaked at about 140 million dollars in annual sales. In that year, art funds raised 60 million dollars, which was too large a quantum of capital given the market size as a whole.
I think two things really hurt the market. First, it was Amit Judge’s decision to shut down Bodhi. We all tried convincing him not to, but it was purely a business decision for him. He really raised the bar in the years he operated, but when Bodhi closed, international collectors lost a lot of confidence. If the biggest player in a market goes under, it sends a strong negative signal. Then there was the Osian’s crisis. Neville Tuli built the organisation with a lot of passion, but when he got into a mess with his fund, it reduced confidence in the market. Between Bodhi and Osian’s, I think they touched pretty much every important buyer in the world.

Girish: Finally, what’s with all these Nandis by H G Arunkumar you feature in your auctions? Is it a mascot of some sort? I see you’ve got an astroturf one here.

Dinesh: (laughs) Any colour, any material, any size, we’ll sell them. They’re actually pretty tough to source.

Chester Herwitz

Background

I interviewed Chester Herwitz in early 1999 for Art India magazine, shortly before he died in a car accident. There aren't very many interviews of the man available. In fact, as far as I can tell, there isn't a single one on free access online. I couldn't arrange for a photographer on the day I interviewed Herwitz, so I returned a week later with Bose Krishnamachari, who had just begun working with photography, and had agreed to take the pictures for Art India. Herwitz had had a bad fall a couple of days previously, and was in a wheelchair, wearing only a shirt and briefs, but wanted the shoot to go ahead.
When I first heard of Herwitz, he was represented as the stereotype of a brash American millionaire. Our first meeting confirmed the brash bit. Sonia Ballaney of Vadehra Art Gallery greeted him, and he turned to me and said, "Do you know Ms. Baloney here"? She took it gracefully. Herwitz's wealth, however, was greatly exaggerated in the minds of those who despised him and disliked collectors in general (there were plenty of those around, even in the late 1990s). I learned he owned just a medium-sized business and himself designed most of the goods he sold. He told me he wasn't buying much art any longer, because he could no longer afford to acquire Husains and Tyeb Mehtas, and, at his age, wasn't interested in "green bananas".

Article (the piece has been edited, and differs from the published version. The quotes have not been altered)

Davida Herwitz welcomes me into a room at the Taj hotel, where I find her husband Chester lying on the bed. As I walk in, he intones, “Father, I want to confess.” Not qualified to grant anybody absolution, I instead check if my dictaphone works. Meanwhile, Herwitz rises to a sitting position and recites a litany of ailments: “My eyes are weak, and I can’t hear too well, and I have an ingrown toenail…”.
It’s a particular pity about the eyes, because Chester Herwitz characterises himself as a very visual person. The self-description isn’t surprising when you consider he has accumulated the most extensive and important individual collection of modern and contemporary Indian art in the world. At its peak, the Herwitz collection contained about 3,400 works, excluding his trove of folk art. The latter must be of considerable interest in itself, given that the Los Angeles County Museum is mounting an exhibition of his Kalighat paintings in June this year.
Chester and Davida Herwitz first came to India in 1961. He was a businessman who designed handbags which used Madras plaids, and he wanted to see how the fabric was made within individual homes in South India. Naturally, he visited a few tourist spots and was fascinated by the temples of Mahabalipuram. The vibrant colours of Rajasthan made an impression as well, the blue dots on the sarees of women breaking stones on the street, their yellow jewellery. He felt a kind of authenticity in the life of Indians: “People were doing actual things, not seeing everything reflected, whether by the media or something else.” Also a sense of energy: “Vitality is the one thing of value in the United States, and you get a sense of it in India too.”
Herwitz was already collecting art at that time, concentrating on the work of a relatively unknown painter called Martin Carey, because, “I was interested in his vision, in seeing through his sensibility”. The moment of truth arrived when he saw M. F. Husain’s ‘Zameen’ at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Delhi. At the time the United States was still dominated by the Greenbergian vision of painting, though Pop Art had made considerable strides. Painting was supposed to be about painting, flat and resolutely non-referential. Husain’s ‘Zameen’ was something very different, “an epic way of describing – not village life – but something we could identify as related to the village… and Husain captures the quality of light in India so well…. It brings such richness to the work. And there was something unique in his paintings like ‘Zameen’: the figures were standing still, but there was so much movement in the canvas, in the way the paint shifted...”
Herwitz began to collect Husain’s paintings and developed a close, abiding friendship with the artist. He might have been content collecting only Husains; “In fact it was Husain’s generosity of spirit which induced me to see the work of some other painters. He said, ‘You keep buying my work, but there are so many other good painters around’, and that’s how I began to visit the studios of painters like Tyeb Mehta.” Herwitz resolved not to collect an artist’s work without seeing it for three years, because beginning to collect an artist was, for him, a commitment to go on acquiring the work, so that the collection would reflect their development. Consistency is one of the hallmarks of the Herwitz collection, and he values artists whose work shows consistency as well, not in the sense that they go on doing the same thing, but that they do not hop erratically from one kind of art to another. In the course of the seventies Herwitz gradually expanded his acquisitions, until most of the country’s best talent featured in his collection.
Herwitz does seem to lean towards figurative art, if the painters he mentions favourably – Husain, Tyeb Mehta, Arpita Singh, Ganesh Pyne, Bikash Bhatacharjee, Nalini Malani, Gieve Patel and Sudhir Patwardhan among them – are any indication. When he talks about the art of these painters he does so backed by deep knowledge, with passion and a natural humility which doesn’t draw attention to itself. He often gestures evocatively, as when he describes the adventurous upsweep of an almost-dry brush in an early Rameshwar Broota canvas, which allows the painting to transcend the obviousness of its satire and symbolism.
When he isn’t discussing paintings or painters, though, Herwitz displays an acid wit, presenting a poker-face and hardly gesturing at all. If you aren’t sure whether he’s joking or serious, the trick is to turn to his wife and check if she’s chuckling. “We’ve known each other forty years and she still finds me funny”, Chester says in amazement. They have travelled to India every winter for most of those forty years, for a month in the early years, for longer periods after their children grew up; they always stay in the same room at the old Taj when in Bombay, another instance, perhaps, of their love of consistency. “That television and the cupboard weren’t here earlier. So we had this space where large canvases could be spread out”, Davida Herwitz explains. She is much more restrained than her impish husband. When he calls one writer a charlatan or refers to a Delhi dealer as a fraud she draws his attention to the fact that everything he says is being taped. But Chester remains undeterred in his opinionatedness.
He laments the shortage of academic examination of contemporary Indian art and the lack of solid art criticism in the country. In far too many cases, “best friends write for best friends”. But what really irks him is “the co-opting of contemporary Indian art by people who did their dissertations in temple stones”. Certainly, the phenomenon of people trained in the history of traditional Indian architecture metamorphosing into authorities on contemporary art is curious. It underlines the point he makes about the lack of trained expertise in the field of writing on contemporary art. If Herwitz himself could write about painting half as eloquently as he talks about it, he would be one of the most perceptive critics in the field, but he brushes the possibility aside, saying, “A collector’s job is not to write about art. A collector has two functions: first, to inject money into the system. Secondly, to preserve the art he collects, to show it to interested people and loan it to galleries and museums.” He has done exceptionally well on all these counts. He bought substantially in a period when there were hardly any serious collectors of art around in India; not a few artists owe their continued ability to paint as they wish to his backing. Most important exhibitions of Indian art abroad have featured work from the Herwitz collection. He has loaned to institutions like the Centre Pompidou, the Tate Gallery, the Chicago Art Institute and the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, ensuring that the paintings he loves touch the lives of people who might otherwise have remained ignorant of the achievements of Indian artists in the last five decades.
Today Chester Herwitz is semi-retired. When you have received the American Handbag Designer of the Year award twice, as he has done, you have nothing left to prove in the world of leather accessories. His business, which employs mainly women, has always allowed workers a remarkable degree of individual choice in work-timings, “Because there are things much more important than the bottom-line”. Keen to maintain a non-abrasive work environment, and having no desire to work for somebody else, Herwitz refused to sell the business when it would have been most lucrative.
His chief concern now is finding a permanent home for his collection. “My ultimate intent was always to establish a museum for my collection. It’s ridiculous to pass something like this down in the family. Amazing how people will do it. I always wanted to return the collection to India, but no museum wanted it.” With funds not forthcoming from Indian business, and problems over locating the proposed museum, he realised he would have to endow a gallery himself, apart from donating his collection. It was to this end that he sold some of his most valued paintings through two sales conducted by Sotheby’s in 1995 and 1996, which triggered the series of auctions of contemporary Indian art witnessed over the past four years.
For somebody who knows each one of the paintings he owns, the auctions were a wrenching experience. “The second sale was unbearable. There was a Sudhir Patwardhan painting called ‘Keralite’, for instance, a wonderful painting…and works by Nalini, and Gieve…but I realised that having 3,200 paintings plus money was better than having 3,400 paintings and no money. And I wanted to bring the quality of the collection to public notice, so I had to part with some of the best work.”
The Herwitz collection will almost certainly be displayed in his home state of Massachusetts where, one guesses, it will probably receive more visitors than the National Gallery of Modern Art manages in Delhi or Bombay. A wing of the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, north of Boston, is being readied to house it. A CD-ROM of the collection is also planned.
The length of my stay for the interview is approaching the outer boundary of what could be considered polite. I look ruefully at the list of unasked questions on my writing-pad, saying, “You know, you don’t need an interviewer at all. I might as well have just sent across the dictaphone.” For once Chester Herwitz is not poker-faced; he smiles and replies, “But you see, I was afraid you’d ask questions I couldn’t answer. And I didn’t want to take that risk, so I didn’t give you a chance. I outwitted you.”