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Indian Art Collection of Howard Hodgkin May Find a Home at the Met, Despite Provenance Concerns

visionsart — Fri, 23 Apr 2021 15:26:47 +0000

The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford turned down the complete collection, valued at £7.2 million, due to concerns over the works’ provenance.

Habiballah of Sava, “A Stallion” (c. 1601-1606), formerly in the collection of Howard Hodgkin. In addition to the potential impending acquisition of Hodgkin’s collection, the Met already owns several artworks previously belonging to, or purchased with funds from, Hodgkin. (courtesy the Met’s Open Access Policy)

In a 1991 essay on the development of his personal art collection, British painter and printmaker Sir Howard Hodgkin recalled his first purchase of an Indian work of art, a colorful depiction of people lounging in a garden painted in Aurangabad in the 17th century. “I must have been about fourteen years old,” Hodgkin wrote. “I have no recollection of how I paid for it.” He remembered that he had tried betting on horses at the race track to raise the requisite funds, but lost.

Though it didn’t stay in Hodgkin’s collection for long, that early acquisition marked an important first step in the artist’s lifelong commitment to collecting Indian art and his passion for the country itself. Hodgkin, a Turner Prize winner renowned for his vividly pigmented abstractions, said that India “changed my way of thinking and probably, the way I paint.” (In 1992, he was also commissioned to paint a large mural for the British Council building in New Delhi.)

When he died in 2017 at the age of 84, Hodgkin left behind a collection of over 115 Indian paintings and drawings from the 16th to 19th centuries, with a particular emphasis on Mughal art — art from India’s last Islamic dynasty — which emerged in conversation with Persian miniature painting and flourished in court ateliers, perhaps most famously, that of Akbar.

Hodgkin’s varied holdings, which he said were led by an artistic eye, rather than a scholarly one, include a large-scale Kota painting of a royal hunting trip with tigers and lion as prey; a Deccani illumination of a vase, which is an ancient fertility motif in Indian art; and an intricate 17th-century painting of a wedding procession, led by a man on an elephant, cutting through a bazaar. Hodgkin was quite partial to depictions of elephants, writing in 1983 that “good Indian drawings of elephants are more frequently encountered than any other subject,” perhaps due to the animals’ shifting volumes and surfaces.

Hodgkin had hoped that his beloved collection, which is said to be valued at over £7.2 million (~$9.9 million), would be transferred in its entirety to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. The Ashmolean, which presented Hodgkin’s collection in an exhibition titled Visions of Mughal India in 2012, has the most comprehensive holdings of objects from the Indian subcontinent of any British museum outside of London, including numerous examples of Mughal art.

However, a source told the Guardian that the Ashmolean turned down the collection due to concerns over the works’ provenance. “One funding body warned the museum privately that, without proof of certain works having left India entirely legally, it would not offer a grant towards the purchase and future grants could also be affected if the museum acquired it anyway,” the British news outlet reported.

Hodgkin’s longtime partner, the music critic Antony Peattie, explained that Hodgkin bought art from international dealers without posing questions about the works’ path from India. “The priorities when Howard was collecting in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s were quality, not provenance,” Peattie said.

Andrew Topsfield, an honorary curator at the Ashmolean with a specialty in art from the Mughal period, determined that 40% of the works on offer had “clear and secure,” fully documented provenance that demonstrated that the works had left India legally. While the museum expressed interest in acquiring only this group of sanctioned works, Hodgkin had always wanted the collection to stay together, viewing it as an autonomous entity of sorts. The deal didn’t go through.

Now, the Guardian has revealed that the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is considering acquiring Hodgkin’s collection, despite the provenance questions that gave the Ashmolean qualms. Peattie confirmed that the acquisition was under discussion at the Met, but made clear that “nothing’s settled.” The Met, the article said, declined to comment. (The museum has not responded to Hyperallergic’s immediate request for comment.)

In addition to having over a dozen works by Hodgkin himself in its permanent collection, the Met also already owns several artworks previously belonging to, or purchased with funds from, Hodgkin, including a painting of a stallion (c. 1601-6) from present-day Afghanistan, an album page with Christian subjects from the late 16th century, and a 17th-century painting of preparations for a hunt, among others.

by Cassie Packard

Indian Art Collection of Howard Hodgkin May Find a Home at the Met, Despite Provenance Concerns

The post Indian Art Collection of Howard Hodgkin May Find a Home at the Met, Despite Provenance Concerns first appeared on Indian Art News.

An Uphill Task

visionsart — Mon, 25 Sep 2017 16:40:00 +0000

In his monograph on Manaku, art historian BN Goswamy reconstructs the life and art of the 18th-century Pahari painter

When BN Goswamy introduced us to the complete portfolio of Nainsukh in 1997, the miniature painter from the hills of Punjab was a relatively little-known entity in the contemporary art world. Goswamy’s discerning biographical sketch not only brought him recognition, but also became a handbook for Nainsukh’s work. Two decades later, the art historian has dedicated a publication to Nainsukh’s elder brother, Manaku. Like his sibling, Manaku, too, was a master practitioner, who painted evocative miniatures and carried forward the tradition inherited from their father Pandit Seu, a leading painter in Guler, a small state in the Punjab hills, at the turn of the 18th century. Unlike Nainsukh, who had several patrons, such as Raja Balwant Singh, Manaku is not known to have a specific patron.

“The project is very close to my heart from the very beginning. Manaku was an extraordinary painter,” says Goswamy, 84. He confesses to being partial to Manaku, who is considered more “conservative” than Nainsukh. It was, after all, his Hiranyagarbha, the depiction of the cosmic egg (considered the seed of all creation) in an opaque watercolour, which Goswamy declares as one of the greatest works of Indian art, also included in his 2014 publication The Spirit of Indian Painting: Close Encounters with 101 Great Works, 1100-1900.

The illustration belongs to one of Manaku’s acclaimed folios, the Bhagavata Purana, which the Pahari artist is believed to have painted on the sheer basis of its style. “I am convinced that Manaku moved to the realm of the gods at night, conversed with them as if they were equals, and came back in the mornings,” said Goswamy, during the Delhi launch of the publication titled Manaku of Guler: The Life and Work of Another Great Indian Painter from a Small Hill State.

One of Manaku’s works published in the book

The narrative in the 512-page book begins from where Goswamy’s own research on artistic traditions began in the 1960s. In an article published in the journal Marg in 1968, titled “Pahari Painting: The family as the basis of style”, Goswamy had argued that stylistic differences in Pahari paintings can be better understood if connected to artists’ families rather than only to princely patrons. An important source for him were the genealogical records or registers of visitors maintained by the pandas or priests in Haridwar, Varanasi and Kurukshetra. “I remember going to Haridwar as a child with my father and writing my name in English and misspelling it,” says Goswamy, adding, “But that got me thinking that pahari painters would also have been pilgrims. Pahaad mein kehte hain ki aap jeeteji Haridwar na gaye, toh mar ke aap zaroor jaayenge. (In the mountains, they say, if you didn’t go to Haridwar in your life, you will go there once you’re dead).”

He found one entry for Manaku, in the register of Sardar Ram Rakha, a tirtha purohit in Haridwar. Reproduced in the book, here Manaku notes that he is a native of Guler, a carpenter, son of Seu, and grandson of Hasnu. While this two-line entry is the only text in the hand of Manaku that has survived, Goswamy also presents two portraits of him that are known to exist — both tinted brush drawings; one where Manaku is estimated to be close to 40 years of years, ascribed to Nainsukh, and another from the National Museum collection, where he looks visibly older.

A portrait of Manaku from the book

In the publication, Goswamy chronicles and discusses each work produced by Manaku according to the one anchor for which he has precise dates: the ‘Gita Govinda’ series — based on poet Jayadeva’s 12th-century Sanskrit love lyric — dated 1730. Every known work by the artist has been recorded in the monograph. Among the earliest is the ‘Siege of Lanka’ series, which, Goswamy infers, could have been a continuation of the ‘Ramayan’ series left unfinished by Manaku’s father, which he adopted on a grander scale.

Manaku gave it “a certain naturalism in the treatment of figures and faces”, but never completed it, and the last few folios were brush drawings in black on uncoloured paper (like in the case of the Bhagavata Purana). Goswamy draws similarities between this set and his next, the ‘Gita Govinda’. “There is much in common between these two series; from the broad, red borders and thin rules and the generally neatly inscribed verses in Devanagari at the back, to the flat, monochromatic backgrounds, high horizons, boldly stylised trees and arbitrarily placed curving rims suggestive of planes in the background,” he writes in the book.

Author of over 25 books, Goswamy, however, does not reject conflicting arguments. Instead, a section in the book is dedicated to the writings of other scholars on Manaku. “I am not holding anything back. As an art historian, I feel responsible to present the different sides,” he says.

Written by Vandana Kalra | Published:September 25, 2017

http://indianexpress.com/article/lifestyle/art-and-culture/an-uphill-task-bn-goswamy-art-historian-manaku-painter-4859527/

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