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Indian Modernist, Artist of Mystery

visionsart — Thu, 30 Oct 2014 14:56:00 +0000

V. S. Gaitonde’s Art Gets a Guggenheim Retrospective

Sandhini Poddar, adjunct curator at the Guggenheim Museum, has organized a retrospective on the Indian modernist painter V. S. Gaitonde, that opens Friday. Credit Andrew Testa for The New York Times

When Sandhini Poddar first saw the paintings of V. S. Gaitonde, their silence spoke loudly. Displayed in a group show in 1997 at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Mumbai, the large abstract canvases, with layered colors and textures, invited long contemplation. “This was a feeling that wasn’t ephemeral, it stayed with me, and I could recall it whenever I wanted to go to a place of silence,” she said.

Gaitonde, in his early 70s at the time, was living in a one-room rented apartment in New Delhi. Although fellow artists and knowledgeable collectors admired his work, he remained in the shadows, as he preferred. He had friends but never married. He gave few interviews. “He was a special kind of fellow,” said the New Delhi painter Krishen Khanna, a friend. “He didn’t doubt himself. He didn’t go around beating his drum. He was very quiet.”

By the time Ms. Poddar, 38, adjunct curator at the Guggenheim Museum, was in a position to help raise awareness of Gaitonde’s achievement, the painter, whom she never met, was no longer available to assist her. He died in 2001. Exploring the residual traces of his life, she discovered that he left remarkably little trail. There were no heirs. No one had inventoried his output. In a long career, he produced relatively few paintings. “There’s always been a kind of mystery surrounding the artist,” Ms. Poddar said. “He’s almost abstract as a person in that way.” As she researched his self-effacing craft, in preparation for a retrospective that will open on Friday at the Guggenheim, the mysteries of Gaitonde only deepened. His obscurity, however, ended with a dramatic flourish

Indian modernist painter V. S. Gaitonde. Credit Shalini Saran

Last December in Mumbai, as part of Christie’s first auction in India, a painting by Gaitonde sold for $3.8 million, the highest price ever for a work of modern Indian art. The auction signaled the arrival not only of this singular painter, but also of an entire generation of postwar Indian artists. Almost every work in the sale of Indian modern art fetched a price that was triple its low estimate, said Deepanjana Klein, the Christie’s vice president for South Asian modern and contemporary art.
For Gaitonde, it helped that the Guggenheim show was on the horizon. Hugo Weihe, then Christie’s international director of Asian art, told his listeners that the painting they were bidding on might well be displayed in a major New York museum the following year. In the audience was Sandhini Poddar’s mother, Rashmi, an art historian and philosopher of aesthetics. (The Poddars, who are part of the prominent Marwari business clan, had consigned work by another artist.

“What have you done?” she texted Sandhini, who was in London, as the gavel descended on the record-setting amount. Her daughter wrote back, “This is nuts.”

A untitled 1979 painting that sold for $3.8 million at auction last year. Credit Lee Ewing

The sale price was certainly startling, but as mother and daughter knew, it could be explained. The growth of the Indian economy over the last two decades has swelled the fortunes of the Indian business class, and with it has come an increased interest in India’s art. The trade in Indian antiquities is tightly restricted; its most fervent collectors are outside the country, in the United States and Europe. Modern Indian art awaited discovery.

The leading Indian modernist painters belonged to the Progressive Artists Group, a loose clique of painters that formed in 1947 in Bombay (as Mumbai was then called). They borrowed the techniques and formal devices of avant-garde Western painting. However, as has happened over the ages, the imported aesthetic would change as it was synthesized in India.

Gaitonde was raised in Bombay and lived there until his move to New Delhi in 1972. In 1950, he joined the Progressive Artists, painting pictures that were heavily influenced by Paul Klee. “Klee was a great god here,” said Mr. Khanna, who affiliated himself with the Progressive Artists. “Everyone felt he had opened a whole new book in painting.”

“Painting No. 6” from 1962. Credit Anil Rane/Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York.

Gaitonde, who developed a deep interest in the teachings of Zen Buddhism, gradually eliminated all figurative representation from his work. He used a roller to build up thin washes of color in translucent complexity, and a palette knife to create contrasting patches of thick impasto. In 1964, he moved for a year to New York, where he could view actual paintings by Western artists instead of reproductions.

Mr. Khanna went with him to visit Mark Rothko. “We saw Mark doing his big paintings, the black ones,” Mr. Khanna recalled. “We were both suitably impressed — Gaitonde greatly impressed.” Although Gaitonde’s paintings don’t resemble Rothko’s formally, they inspire a similar meditative mood. “When you concentrate on the painting, you are sucked into the painting,” Mr. Khanna said.

In his later years, Gaitonde would apply cutout strips to his canvas and apply his roller over them until they hovered as ghostly forms. He created only a half-dozen or so paintings in a year. Although he could be adamant about his pricing — Mr. Khanna remembered once seeing the director of the National Gallery of Modern Art approach Gaitonde to suggest a discount, then walk away quickly in obvious defeat — he showed no interest in material possessions or commercial success. “After the work was taken away, he didn’t have any relationship with it,” Sandhini Poddar said. “He went on to the next idea.”

An untitled ink on paper from 1987. Credit Anil Rane/Collection of Ram Kumar

His dedication to his art and self-imposed absence from the persiflage of casual daily life obviously appeal to Ms. Poddar. “She lives in a world of abstraction, almost,” her mother said. “It’s not just the notion of silence, but the experience of silence.” In 2008, Sandhini spent 10 days in a silent retreat at a Buddhist monastery in Massachusetts. On her return, she shaved off all of her long hair. “She wanted to experience detachment,” Rashmi Poddar said. “One of the things she was attached to was her hair as a sign of beauty. So she cut it off. ” It has since grown back.

Sandhini gravitated to the orbit of Rashmi and other art lovers in the family. (A cousin by marriage owns two drawings and a painting in the Guggenheim show.) “When other kids were doing cartwheels, I was at the Louvre,” she said. She melded a passion for modern Western art with a devotion to traditional India. Earning postgraduate degrees in ancient Indian culture and Indian aesthetics from the University of Mumbai, she added a master’s in arts administration at New York University.

Coming late to art history, she draws on her interdisciplinary studies as a source of insight. Referring to the rich reds and yellows in Gaitonde’s palette and to his calligraphic forms, she said: “What aspect of the miniature painting tradition is Gaitonde taking? What part of the Zen tradition?” In her view, medieval Indian art and Eastern philosophy are as relevant as the Progressive Artists Group to an understanding of Gaitonde’s accomplishment.

An untitled painting from 1955. Credit Florian Biber/Chowdhury Family Collection, Vienna-Mumbai

Before taking on Gaitonde for the Guggenheim, Ms. Poddar oversaw exhibitions there on two Indian expatriates: the sculptor Anish Kapoor and (in a show organized by the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles) the printmaker Zarina. With an eye to enlarging its global profile, the Guggenheim is devoting more space to artists from outside the United States and Western Europe. More controversially, as part of its worldwide mission it is establishing a branch in Abu Dhabi. Like New York University, which built a campus there, the Guggenheim has faced criticism over the conditions for construction workers.

Acquiring art from the Subcontinent that will be displayed in Abu Dhabi, Ms. Poddar is aware that people from the region constitute by far the largest demographic group, but they are there mainly as temporary workers and may never enjoy the museum’s offerings. “You have a public to serve, but it is not a museum-going public,” she said. “It is not just enough to put the collection together. Abu Dhabi is so young. At the end of the day, the question is the same: Who are you serving, and how are you going to serve them?”

Positioning Indian artists within the overall narrative of modern art is another delicate challenge. In recent decades, many Latin American artists of the mid-20th century have been recognized as central to art history. Will any Indian artists attain comparable status? Rashmi Poddar, for one, is skeptical. “Much of it is derivative,” she said. “In Indian art, we’ve always had this love of embellishment and the decorative. Indian art has never been abstract.” Christie’s Ms. Klein, on the other hand, maintains that as more museums explore modern and contemporary Indian art — she noted exhibitions in Philadelphia, Chicago and San Diego — the scholarship will deepen, winning wider acclaim for artists. It is not only the scholarship that has a way to go. Within India, the conditions for displaying art are still so undeveloped that Sandhini Poddar was unable to find a financially stable museum that could accept the Gaitonde show.

Ms. Poddar lives in England, where she is engaged to marry William Sargent, the co-founder and C.E.O. of a company that creates special effects for movies, “Gravity” among them. She is also planning to return to school to get a Ph.D. She seemed confident about Gaitonde’s stature as a world-class painter, but when the topic turned to India’s place in the history of modern art, she became a bit less certain. Asked who stood on the same rung as Gaitonde, she hesitated. “I think he is rather exceptional,” she said.

The answer on India’s role in modern art is pending; happily, the scholarship that can settle the question has begun.

By ARTHUR LUBOWOCT. 18, 2014

The post Indian Modernist, Artist of Mystery first appeared on Indian Art News.

Anish Kapoor Installation Opens in October as Part of Guggenheim’s 50th Anniversary

visionsart — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 10:17:00 +0000

NEW YORK, NY.- Memory (2008), a major new site-specific sculpture installation by leading international artist Anish Kapoor, will be on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum from October 21, 2009, to March 28, 2010 as part of the Deutsche Bank Series at the Guggenheim. Anish Kapoor: Memory is the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation’s first collaboration with the artist, who is celebrated for his expansive and profound aesthetic vision. The work is the 14th in a series of artist projects commissioned by Deutsche Bank and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation for the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin.

Since the late 1970s, Kapoor has extended the scope and language of contemporary sculpture through his explorations of scale, color, and the concept of the void. Constructed of Cor-Ten steel—a new material for the artist—Memory is a milestone for Kapoor. The work is composed of 154 Cor-Ten steel tiles, measures 14.5 x 8.97 x 4.48 meters overall, and weighs 24 tons. Its form nearly fills the gallery it occupies, challenging and altering the museum’s architecture through its improbable scale and proportions. The title, “Memory,” alludes to how visitors encounter the work, which can never be seen in its entirety and remains largely hidden from view.
Anish Kapoor: Memory was initiated in 2006 by Alexandra Munroe, Senior Curator of Asian Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and is curated by Sandhini Poddar, Assistant Curator of Asian Art. In early 2007, Kapoor was invited to create a site-specific work capable of engaging two very different exhibition locations: the Deutsche Guggenheim, where the work debuted in November 2008, and the Guggenheim Museum. “The Guggenheim Museum is delighted to present Anish Kapoor’s Memory in New York in our Deutsche Bank series of commissioned works by leading contemporary artists,” remarked Richard Armstrong, Director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and Museum. “This show is presented as part of the museum’s 50th Anniversary program, and underscores our commitment to the importance of working with living artists,” continued Armstrong.

Kapoor’s earlier large-scale site-specific installations, such as Taratantara (1999), Marsyas (2002), and Svayambh (2007), succeeded in creating new perceptions of space through their distortions of scale. Continuing these types of distortions, Memory’s enormous scale prevents viewers from perceiving a gestalt. The work divides the gallery space into several distinct viewing areas, which can be approached either from the museum ramps, elevator banks, or the adjacent gallery. Visitors to the Guggenheim Museum are compelled to navigate different sections of the building as each vantage point offers only a glimpse of either the sculpture’s exterior form or its interior shell. This processional method of viewing the sculpture is an intrinsic aspect of the work. Kapoor asks visitors to connect and construct the fragmented images of Memory retained in their minds and thus exert more effort in their acts of seeing. Kapoor calls this process creating a “mental sculpture.”

As a 24-ton volume of Cor-Ten steel, Memory is vast, ineffable, raw, and industrial. Compressed into one of the Guggenheim Museum’s annex galleries, the sculpture’s sheer volume is foreboding, as its peripheries glance against the gallery walls and ceiling with the utmost precision. From within, Memory’s seamless eight-millimeter-thick steel tiles, meticulously manufactured to ensure absolute darkness inside, read as one continuous form. Viewable only through a two-square-meter aperture, these seamless tiles create the boundless void of Memory’s cavernous interior. Kapoor has created a sculpture whose interior space seems much more vast than that defined by its exterior form. A staircase leading from the adjacent gallery offers a view through the aperture. The precise wedging of this hole into the gallery wall defines a flat, two-dimensional plane that, from a certain distance, appears as a painting rather than an opening. Kapoor’s interest in this pictorial effect is best reflected in his frequently quoted statement, “I am a painter working as a sculptor.”

Anish Kapoor was born in 1954 in Bombay (now Mumbai), India, and currently lives and works in London. Kapoor has exhibited extensively both internationally and in London; his solo shows have included venues such as the Kunsthalle Basel; Tate Modern, London; Hayward Gallery, London; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Palacio de Velázquez, Madrid; CAPC Museé d’art contemporain, Bordeaux, France; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; and MAK–Österreichisches Museum für angewandte Kunst/Gegenwartskunst, Vienna. He represented Britain at the 1990 Venice Biennale and was awarded its Premio Duemila prize. He was the recipient of the prestigious Turner Prize, awarded in 1991. He has undertaken a number of major large-scale installations and commissions, including Taratantara (BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, England, 1999, and Piazza del Plebicito, Naples, 2000–01), Marsyas (Tate Modern, London, 2002–03), Cloud Gate (Millennium Park, Chicago, 2004–present), Sky Mirror (Rockefeller Center, New York, 2006) and Svayambh (Haus der Kunst, Munich, 2007–08). Kapoor will have a major solo exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in fall 2009.

Source – Artdaily

The post Anish Kapoor Installation Opens in October as Part of Guggenheim’s 50th Anniversary first appeared on Indian Art News.