Art-ograph please!

Artists and collectors, patrons and celebrities come together to 'canvas' for a cause

Palaniappan Chidambaram routinely puts his signature to India's annual budget, on cheques that amount to Rs 5,60,000 crore. Yet, last evening, that same signature was dwarfed by Anjolie Ela Menon's signed scrawl, purely on her merit as an artist.

Or take Ratan Tata, who presides over companies with a net worth in excess of Rs 50,000 crore. But last night it was Laxman Shreshtha's signature that brought Tata's worth as an artist into the limelight.

It was a jugalbandhi of sorts, between artists and their collectors, or patrons, or just other celebrities, two people who each painted canvases that were then put up for auction at the British High Commissioner's residence, among a sea of paddles, as celebrities bid for other celebrities' signatures.

If there was Arpita Singh and Jatin Das and Paresh Maity and Sunil Das on one side, there was Amitabh Bachchan and Montek Singh Ahluwalia and Subrata Roy and Y C Deveshwar on the other. Together, artists and non-artists collaborated to paint over 120 canvases, the proceeds from which are intended for NGO Khushii.

"The value of each work," says hotelier Aman Nath, who conceived the ambitious India on Canvas charity auction, "has to do with its rarity."

Which means that Naina Lal Kidwai's construction with artist Akhilesh, or Sharmila Tagore's with Paresh Maity, imbue them with a higher worth than that of just the artist, making it worth the while for bidders, while also turning the whole charity event into a festive celebration that brings together artists and sponsors and collectors and even socialites into a carnival of art.

"When I proposed the idea," muses Nath "" who is also a writer in his spare time """everyone's first reaction was that that nobody was going to paint for me." That included both artist and collaborating co-artist. "But I can safely say that no one else could have got Mr Tata to paint," he gloats just a bit.

Fresh from having done a book on a hundred years of the Tata group, for the Tata group, "I told him that I had given up nine months of my life on that project, now he could give me a few hours on this one. I know it sounds like blackmail, but Mr Tata responded to the message," and the rest, well, just fell into place.

Okay, you say, they did it for a lark, but not seriously, not beyond the photo opportunity surely? "They sketched," Nath admonishes, "they drew, they painted, they were anxious about the result, they kept asking "How is it?', they were so into it!"

Those results are quite astonishing, actually "" flawless paintings for the most part that are then marred by an occasional amateur effort, that adds to the overall value! Such as Nath's own effort, when he was coaxed into painting a pigeon on a lithograph by French artist Maite Delteil.

Nath passes with flying colours for an amateur, but on the litho, his addition is intrusive and ugly. Yet it works. That, at the end, is what the whole auction is about.

Others who have painted for the cause include Khushii president Vandana Luthra, in a reflective moment taken with the challenge of doing something for children, running an orphanage, simply being a part of the world of the underprivileged.

"It's been a year in the planning," she says, "and six months of working. We've done it all ourselves, not hiring event managers, looking after everything from hotel bookings to air tickets, taking no corporate help anywhere. The point was not to spend any of the money on extraneous things," and she's hoping that the event will result in a corpus of Rs 6 crore for Khushii.

Most of Khushii's activities are centred around an orphanage in Neemrana, Rajasthan, a two-hour ride by car from the capital where "we have transformed the village, have a hospital and school, train children and women in healthcare and development", says Luthra.

In particular, she says those who supported her on the project have been Renuka Chaudhary, minister for women and chiold development in Delhi, and former actor Tina Ambani in Mumbai. "We managed to get a lot of people through them," she says.

Only a few artists have donated their works to the auction , most others getting 25 per cent of the proceeds, with the remaining 75 per cent going to Khushii. The 12.5 per cent tax has been given a waiver as a charity event.

Nor would the event have proceeded as effortlessly if it hadn't been for Harveen Kapoor, a woman entrepreneur and social worker, who is a founder-member and the secretary general of Khushii. "She's level-headed, and was able to hold her head, even as there was chaos all around," says Luthra.

At the end of the day, what has taken many by surprise is not just a Rameshwar Boota and C K Birla pairing on a work of art, or an Amitava Das flanking Sunil Mittal in his effort to leave an impression on canvas, but the genuine efforts of amateur artists emerging on a public platform "" such as sarod player Amaan Ali Bangash (with brother Amaan Ali) whose canvas has elements of an assured hand, or even the children of the orphanage in Neemrana, who have paired brilliantly with Shalini Passsi on an acrylic canvas.

As for others, there's Sakti Burman, Nina Pillai, Karan Grover, Nupur Kundu, Praful Patel, Naresh Trehan, Manish Pushkale, Justin Ponmany, Ritu Kumar, Rajshree Pathy "" here, for the purpose of this auction, painters all of them!

LINE AND LENGTH

Drawings, says gallerist Ashish Anand, exhibit an "intimacy, sincerity and instant appeal". One couldn't agree more. And the Delhi Art Gallery's eponymous show of drawings by 12 artists, The Naked Line, while hardly the first, is still an important step in throwing the spotlight on this often-neglected medium.

On at the gallery in Hauz Khas, Delhi till the end of the month, the show curated by Roobina Karode includes the familiar, strong (and provocative) lines of F N Souza that exude a raw energy, as well as A Ramachandran's "working drawings", Rabin Mandal's brooding, pessimistic imagery, the unselfconscious doodles of Ambadas Khobragade, the fantasy figures of Laxma Goud, and Sunil Das trying to make sense of the world (and people?) with his limbs and torsos in disarray.

There are the more whimsical works of J Sultan Ali and Jai Zharotia, Himmat Shah's exact drawings within a structured space, Amitava Das' mutant forms and the political commentary of Bengal gripped by famine in Chittaprosad Bhattacharya's haunting images that are like sharp, incisive political commentary.

A book lets you take the 12 artists home, for when memory is fading but the images will continue to haunt you long after the show is gone.

MODERN, DATED

A decade of contemporary art in India would show changes almost overwhelming when viewed in the context of what had occurred in a hundred years before, so much so that the exclusions of change since Edge of Desire was first conceived in 2001 and mounted in 2004 are almost as overpowering as the social, cultural and economic changes the Recent Art in India indicates.

Certainly, any "Indian" show that has travelled around the world (Australia, America, Mexico) before coming "home" for a viewing at the National Gallery of Modern Art (New Delhi, November 14-December 8, and Mumbai, January 5-February 2) would have immense potential.

There may not be "exclamations of joy and wonder" when the works are unpacked in India, as there were in Australia, but Edge of Desire, curated by Chaitanya Sambrani, is significant as it marks the opening of the Asia Society India Centre (in Mumbai) this year. Thirty-four artists and India's social context provide a great visual paradigm within which to view this signature show.