This brief essay on India’s National Gallery of Modern Art traces the early years of the institution from when it was set up in 1954. It was an important site for the art world as much as for the newly independent nation state declaring its commitment to modernity.

In recent years there has been a considerable interest in Indian museums and their relationship to audiences. Appadurai and Breckenridge in their seminal essay ‘Museums are Good to Think’ look at the museum’s role in the “elaboration of the public sphere in non-western nations.”¹ The authors are interested in the transformation of the museum site under global impulses where “new visual formations link heritage politics to spectacle, tourism and entertainment.”² The sub-category of the art museum, however, does not present them with many possibilities when it comes to mapping contemporary public gaze in Indian life. They write, “…Except for a small minority in India and for a very short period of its history and in very few museums there, art in the current western sense is not a meaningful category…. In place of art other categories of objects dominate, such as handicraft, technology, history and heritage.”³

While not disputing the marginality of the art museum in terms of the general public it draws, in the Indian institutional landscape, this essay chooses precisely such an institution that focuses on the category of ‘art’. This emblematic institution, the only of its kind, was set up in 1954 by the Government of India. From 1938 when such an institution was first proposed by an artist-based organisation, the All India Fine Arts and Craft Society (AIFACS), through the sub-sequent artists’ conferences that delineated the nature and scope of this institution, to its establishment by the government in 1954, and through the political leadership and the museum directors that determined its contours, and of course the parallel developments in art practice that it was trying to account for and represent, the NGMA has been subject to different pressures and imaginings. In the course of this unfolding history it has grappled with ideas of modernism, nationalism, tradition and internationalism and equally tried to address questions of identity and Indian-ness.

Proposing a National Art Gallery – The AIFACS Version

By early 20th century one can see a complex relay of styles, institutions, publications and exhibitions emerging in the Indian art scene. And it is from within this community of artists and critics that the first demands of a national art gallery were made. Unlike the National Museum which was a key project for a government body like the Archaeological Survey of India from 1912 onwards, the first proposal for a National Art Gallery was made by a Delhi-based artists’ organisation, the All India Fine Arts and Crafts Society (AIFACS), in 1938. In the subsequent years, however, AIFACS claims were diluted by the factions that arose amongst the artists, with the newly set up All India Association of Fine Arts, Bombay putting forth its own agency as a central organisation at the Third All India Art conference in 19484. The All India Academy of Fine Arts, Calcutta, also proposed converting the Arts Section of the Indian Museum into a National Art Gallery.

It was left to the 1949 Art Conference at Calcutta, organised by Government of India, to resolve the matter once and for all. The Conference called for the formation of a Central Advisory Board of Art (formed in 1950) and passed a resolution for the early establishment of National Art Gallery and the improvement of National Museum as well as the formation of the three Akademis as part of a Sub Commission for Culture of the Indian National Commission for Cooperation with UNESCO.

The first attempt at the setting up of the National Art Gallery was made by an artist group whose founders owed their allegiance to the Bengal School and were, in keeping with the School’s ideals, keen to institutionalise the category of ‘national art’. The Bengal Schools move to identify an indigenist form of art with national sovereignty had a specific function in the anticolonial struggle. But with the passage of time, agendas had shifted, and from imagining itself as a site of resistance, India was now assuming a new authority as a post-colonial nation. AIFACS tried to address this shift by envisaging an art museum based on mass support, which organised art exhibitions as appendages to official conferences and meetings, and devised pragmatic roles for artists as makers of public commemorative art and assistants in government-driven mass education schemes. But the category of the national modern was being recalibrated by various members of the artist community, and above all by the state, and the museum would now be taken on a different course.

Institutionalising the Modern

Already by 1947-48 there were signs of the state’s interest in this project with Nehru personally intervening in the major purchase of the Amrita Sher-Gil collection and the more minor one of a few Brunner paintings.⁵ These, among other moves, by the Indian state in general and Nehru in particular, made evident the desire to centralise and nationalise the modern art museum.

Meanwhile another sequence was unfolding at the Burlington House, London with the ceremonial 1947-1948 exhibition titled ‘The Arts of India and Pakistan.’ Organised by Royal Academy of Art, to mark the transfer of power in British India, it was followed by another version of the exhibition, ‘Masterpieces of Indian Art,’ at the Government House, New Delhi in the winter of 1948. In her extensive essay on these ceremonial exhibitions that eventually led to the formation of the National Museum, Tapati Guha-Thakurta shows how the London exhibition was bracketed by sections on ‘British Artists in India’ at the start, and ‘Modern Paintings, Drawings and Sculptures’ at the end.⁶ The catalogue rather apologetically acknowledged a motley section of Bengal school, Amrita Sher-Gil, Zainul Abedin, N S Bendre, F N Souza, Dhanraj Bhagat and Kanwal Krishna, which were “nothing comparable in aesthetic interest with the great achievements of Indian sculptors,”⁷ but were included nonetheless to present a complete image of Indian art abroad. However, neither of these sections was carried over to the subsequent exhibition held in New Delhi at the Government House. Here one sees a definite exclusion of the modern from “this spectacle of India’s art heritage. …and we find ourselves fully in the grips of an art historical past.”⁸ The modern was bypassed and the great nation was conjured exclusively through its ancient and medieval art heritage.

While the mandate of the ‘national’ was being handed to the art objects from India’s great past, the state had a different role in mind for modern art and by extension the NGMA. It was seen as one among a series of cultural institutions that were set up in the post-colonial landscape of the 1940s-50s which served to dislodge the modern from the discourse of the national. Geeta Kapur notes how culture becomes an important means to disentangle the modern from the nationalist polemic. “The latter had often to speak in the name of tradition even as it covertly strengthened the desire for the modern. While national struggle had attempted to simulate a civilisational quest, the nation state was bound to privilege culture as a means of cohering contemporaniety.”⁹ Under Nehru’s leadership a whole set of institutions were founded that carried the overall mandate of the modern. They were part of what Partha Chatterjee terms India’s statist utopia.¹⁰

National Gallery of Modern Art was formally inaugurated by the Vice President of India, Dr S Radhakrishnan, on March 29, 1954 in New Delhi. It was located in Jaipur House which had been originally built as the winter palace of the Maharaja of Jaipur in the 1930s. German scholar and museologist Hermann Goetz was brought over from the Baroda Museum where he had been the director between 1943 and 1954, and given charge of the institution. The Gallery opened with an exhibition of contemporary sculpture apart from showcasing its initial collection of around 200 works which consisted of paintings by Amrita Sher-Gil, Rabindranath Tagore, Jamini Roy, Nandalal Bose and MAR Chugtai, among others. The works displayed at the sculpture exhibition also doubled as the First National Exhibition of Modern Art¹¹ and sculptor D P Roy Chowdhury’s Triumph of Labour won the first prize and was commissioned to be made as a public sculpture on the lawns of the museum.

National Gallery of Modern Art – The Sher-Gil Collection

The core of the NGMA collection was without doubt a suite of 96 paintings by artist Amrita Sher-Gil that came into the hands of the state as early as 1948. In many ways, it is this cache of paintings that determined the course of the institution. The search for a reconfigured national modern that could translate the impulses and the potential of the ‘new paradigm’ found resolution, as much by design as by default, in the figure of Amrita Sher-Gil¹².

In 1947 when Amrita Sher-Gil’s husband Dr Victor Eagen offered 33 paintings to the Government of India for sale, the Finance Ministry rejected the proposal to procure the collection given the price. The matter might have ended prematurely but for the insistence of Sher-Gil’s father, Umrao Singh Sher-Gil, who was keen to remove the paintings from Eagen’s possession. Umrao Singh offered to gift a large body of Sher-Gil’s works to the nation but on the precondition that the latter was able to obtain the paintings in her husband’s collection. In a letter to Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, dated 23 April 1948, Umrao Singh wrote, “Most of her earlier juvenile work, when she was at School of Art in Paris, is with us. We wish to give them freely to the nation, along with sketches and studies which Amrita had intended to destroy. They serve along with her early works to show the development of her art and talent…. But if her later works are not actually acquired by our nation, then what good will the old style work, which she herself did not value, be.”¹³

At this point, Nehru intervened to ensure the acquisition of the Sher-Gil paintings. He also took up the matter with Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, on March 7, 1948, “I think it desirable for government to acquire her paintings as a whole. Just a few chosen ones would not be good enough. It would be possible to get the paintings from Amrita’s parents without payment provided we make it clear we are getting the collection from the others also. As for the husband, he is not very well off and can easily sell them separately and may well do so if we delay.”¹⁴

Thus we see a number of events converging–ranging from Sher-Gil’s charismatic artistic persona and untimely death, the subsequent family feud and Nehru’s personal intervention in resolving it, the sheer range of the collection, the fragile material conditions of many works– to place the Sher-Gil collection at the centre of the Gallery, six years before its actual formation.

In 1953, the Gallery had a nucleus of 163 paintings consisting predominantly of Amrita Sher-Gil paintings, apart from collections of the other ‘three pioneering modernists’–Rabindranath Tagore, Jamini Roy and Gaganendranath Tagore. The press reviews of the opening of NGMA in 1954 lavished praise on the Sher-Gil rooms (the only air conditioned rooms in the Gallery because of the fragile material conditions of the paintings) for their complete chronological display. Art critic Charles Fabri wrote, “The glory of the collection is Amrita Sher-Gil…. Paintings that are from her childhood to her years in Hungary, Budapest and Paris, right upto her last, unfinished canvas found on her easel.”¹⁵

In the initial years the Sher-Gil collection, which came into its possession much before the formation of the actual institution, made the Gallery align with a modernist practice that was progressive, cosmopolitan and in conversation with an international modernism. It was a practice that was supported by a generation of powerful writers and intellectuals like Mulk Raj Anand and W G Archer who were close to the political establishment. But despite this ‘solid core of greatness,’¹⁶ the emphasis within the Gallery remained on marking the moments of modernism’s origin. Accordingly, it enshrined the four initiators of modern art in India, Rabindranath Tagore, Amrita Sher-Gil, Jamini Roy and Gaganendranath Tagore, even as the new generation of Progressive Artists’ Groups sprung up all over the country. The mandate of making sense of the current art movements was handed over to another cultural institution set up in the same year as NGMA – Lalit Kala Akademi (LKA) – which was an autonomous body governed by artists, scholars and government nominees but without any government interference in its activities. The NGMA thus absolved itself from needing to respond to current art scene or the needs of the artists, working with a more classical understanding of a museum as a historical and highly insulated institution. The LKA played the role of the democratic state institution responding to the artists’ needs – showcasing latest trends with its annual national exhibitions and creating a climate of state patronage that gave equal representation to different schools and movements. The success and failure of this enterprise is, of course, another story.

The text is an excerpt from the essay ‘Museumising Modern Art, NGMA: the Indian Case-Study’ to be published in the upcoming volume tentatively titled No Touching No Spitting No Praying: Museum Cultures of South Asia, Routledge, edited by Dr Kavita Singh and Dr Saloni Mathur.

References and Footnotes

1. Arjun Appadurai & Carol Breckenridge, ‘Museums are Good to Think’, in Representing the Nation: A Reader, Eds. David Boswell & Jessica Evans, Routledge, London & New York, 1999, p. 418
2. Ibid 418
3. Ibid, p. 406
4. The All India Association of Fine Arts, Bombay was set up in 1946 with G Venkatachalam as president and members like Karl Khandalvala. The Association organised the 3rd All India Conference for Arts in 1948 because it noted that the first two conferences in Delhi had not been able to form a central art organisation that was wholly representative. They received a sum of Rs 21 lakhs for arts, education and cultural activities from the Government of Bombay. They declared that arts did not depend on official support alone but needed individuals and groups to come together spontaneously. If AIFACS was interested in being an official body, AIFACS was asking for the status of an autonomous artist association.
5. B P Singh, ‘Arts, Cultural Pageants and the state: The Nehru-Azad Dialogue’, India’s Culture, the State, the Arts and Beyond, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2009, p. 100 – 111. Singh looks into the purchase of the Brunner paintings by Jawaharlal Nehru. In June 1948, the PM visited Nainital and chanced upon paintings of two Hungarian artists Sass Brunner and her daughter Elizabeth Brunner. Touched by their sensitivity, he purchased a few of them including the one of Mahatma Gandhi in meditation, for his own collection. On his return to Delhi, he wrote to Abul Kalam Azad (14 June, 1948) recommending the paintings be acquired by Government of India. Azad referred the matter to the Ministry of Education (MOE) who solicited the help of R N Chakravarty, chief artist in Publications Division, MOE, and Barada Ukil for their opinions on the paintings. Both stated that the works were mediocre and did not deserve the price being asked. Nehru joined in to counter this assessment of the artists. The matter finally ended with the Government of India buying the works but not before the Ministry of Finance emphasised the need for prior clearance before making any financial commitments. It eventually led to the constitution of the art purchase committee for museums under the chairmanship of Vice President of India, with experts like Moti Chandra, Karl Khandalvala, Rai Krishnadas and others.
6. Tapati Guha-Thakurta, ‘The Demands of Independence: From a National Exhibition to a National Museum’, Monuments, Objects, Histories: Institutions of Art in Colonial and Post-Colonial India, Columbia University Press, New York and Permanent Black, New Delhi, 2004, p 277
7. Ibid. quoted by Guha-Thakurta from the catalogue Exhibition of Art, chiefly from the Dominions of India and Pakistan, Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington House, London, 1947-48, (London: Royal Academy, 1947) p. 192 – 195 held at the Government House
8. Ibid. p 274 9. Geeta Kapur, ‘Sovereign Subject: Ray’s Appu’, When was Modernism, Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India, Tulika Books, New Delhi, 2000, p. 202
9. Ibid p. 201
10. The competition is referred to in the Hindustan Standard, 7 July 1957
11. The flamboyant artist of mixed Indo–Hungarian parentage, Amrita Sher-Gil studied at the Ecole des Beaux, Paris, between 1929 and 1934. In ’33 she exhibited at the Grand Salon, where she won a medal for her painting Young Girls and was also elected an Associate. She returned to India at the end of 1934, taking on the mantle of an Indian artist. She died at the very young age of 29 in December 1941, a few days before her major solo exhibition in Lahore. Her death was mourned at an almost national scale and public figures like Nehru and Gandhi sent condolences to the Sher-Gil family.
12. Letter by Umrao Singh Sher-Gil to Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, Minister of Education, GOI, dated 23 April 1948, F.178–16/48–G–2, National Archives, New Delhi, unpublished
13. Ibid, letter by Nehru to Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, Minister of Education, TOI dated 7 March, 1948 15. Charles Fabri, ‘review of NGMA opening’, Marg, Volume 8, No. 3, 2nd Quarter, 1954
14. File on W G Archer’s letter to Ashfaque Husain, F.3-112/54 – A.2, National Archives, Government of India, 1954, unpublished. W G Archer, who had served from 1931 – 1948 as a civil servant in India, returned to England after India’s independence to become the Keeper of the Indian collections at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Well respected for his research and scholarship on Indian folk, popular and miniature traditions, as well modern art, he was commissioned between January 2 and March 26, 1954 by the Ministry of Education to conduct a three month survey of national, state and art galleries and provide suggestions for their better administration. Archer complimented the government on its Sher-Gil collection which he described as “a superb achievement, giving the Gallery a solid core of greatness”. At the same time, he stated candidly, “It has to be remembered that the actual number of living artists whose works really deserve to be represented is probably small and it takes a great deal of courage to recognise originality.”