Unveiling Gaitonde for the West

The story of an artist is told through many eyes and many hands — the galleryists who exhibit his paintings and fix a value on them, the critics who write about it, the connoisseurs who buy him. For Sandhini Poddar, adjunct curator at New York's Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the process of putting together the retrospective of Vasudev S. Gaitonde, thus, became a process of "excavating" these "eyes" and "hands" responsible for his reputation as one of India's foremost modernist painters.

This is especially true of Gaitonde (1924-2001) who was notoriously reticent — silence was important to him. As he famously told Pritish Nandy in a 1991 interview, "Everything starts from silence. The silence of the brush. The silence of the canvas. The silence of the painting knife. The painter starts by absorbing all these silences." This is one of only two interviews that Gaitonde gave in his lifetime: the second was to art critic and curator Meera Menezes, who is now researching a book on him. The only other contemporaneous source of information on Gaitonde that Poddar found was a 1983 catalogue, all of six pages, published by Lalit Kala Akademi. So Poddar had to rely on conversations with Gaitonde's few remaining artist friends — Ram Kumar, Krishen Khanna, Akbar Padamsee, Laxman Sreshtha and Prabhakar Kolte — who shared insights, anecdotes and reminiscences.

But more difficult, Poddar found, was bringing together the best of Gaitonde's oeuvre from across the world. After all, a retrospective at a museum as globally renowned as the Guggenheim needs to trace the development of his style over decades through important, representative canvases. It took Poddar more than two years, the length of time quite disproportionate to the small number of canvases — just 45 — in the show. In the process, Poddar uncovered a fascinating, but little-known aspect of our modern art history — the story of the early collectors of modern Indian art who bought artists like Gaitonde (for a pittance, by today's standards) way back in the 1950s and 1960s.

The most fascinating of these is Bilwa Kanta Chowdhury and his Viennese wife Eleonore. Little is known about Chowdhury except that he was a businessman who lived in Bombay in the 1950s and was among the earliest collectors of Gaitonde. The Chowdhurys, says Poddar who met Eleonore (Bilwa Kanta is dead) as part of her research, would organise weekly salons at their home near Nariman Point, to which Gaitonde and other artists would come. It was Chowdhury, Eleonore told Poddar, "who inspired [Jehangir] Nicholson to begin collecting". Nicholson went on to become one of the most important collectors of modern Indian art, amassing a large collection between 1968 and 2001 (the year he died) that is now housed in the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS). The Guggenheim retrospective has two canvases from the Nicholson collection, both from 1974, painted in the "lift-off" style that Gaitonde had begun to use after moving to Delhi in 1972 where he used torn pieces of newsprint to create abstract forms. The Chowdhury family, based in Vienna and Mumbai, loaned three canvases from the 1950s, an important period in Gaitonde's career, when his paintings were transitioning from depicting recognisable reality to a discernible abstraction.

But it wasn't the private collectors who proved difficult to work with — except one Delhi-based industrialist who, Poddar says, first agreed to collaborate, but pulled out at a later stage. It was the mandarins who oversee the institutional collections whom Poddar found harder to persuade. Among these are the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), CSMVS and, most important, the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) collection put together by Homi Bhabha. The founding director of TIFR was one of the earliest to recognise Gaitonde's talent; the collection is represented by three rare canvases from 1953.

Gaitonde's repute was fixed early among artists and connoisseurs in India. He was part of the Venice Biennale in 1954; five years later, he was at the India Pavilion at the Sao Paolo Biennale; and in 1957-58, he got a Japanese award for young Asian artists. The market too has started to catch up with record auction prices. The Rs 23.7 crore a Gaitonde canvas sold for at an auction last year makes him our priciest artist. But the West, the dominant voice in global art circles, has yet to discover the magic of Gaitonde. Hopefully, this landmark exhibition will help to fill that vacuum.

V.S. Gaitonde: Painting as Process, Painting as Life opened at the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York on October 24 and will continue until February 11 2015