Art critic Jonathan Jones set the cat among the pigeons ahead of the opening of a Bhupen Khakhar retrospective at the prestigious Tate Modern in London when he referred to one of India's key modernists as "incredibly unimpressive", dissing him as "drab and vague", his paintings "big and boring" and the work itself of "archaic mediocrity". It is unusual for a critic to be so outrageously vicious. Khakhar's work, outside of its context and milieu, can appear difficult to absorb, but to Jones, who seems not to have made the effort, "He is genuinely not good."
What does this say of art criticism, our understanding of contexts, or indeed, of the critic himself? Should he be lauded for his courage of conviction or dismissed for his ignorance? "Why are we supposed to be interested in this old-fashioned, second-rate artist whose paintings are stuck in a time warp of 1980s neo-figurative cliche?" he asks. Certainly, he appears to have riled even casual readers of The Guardian who have found his excoriating attack indefensible, and Salman Rushdie - who has been represented at the National Portrait Gallery by Khakhar's portrait of him - rose to his defence, pointing out that the same paper had, only a few days earlier, published a "far more knowledgeable and better written piece" on the artist by Amit Chaudhuri.
Khakhar's outing at the Tate Modern has been keenly awaited for the past year, and had created a market buzz with prices hardening, and Christie's in London put three works in its May sale of which At New Jersey fetched Rs 1.3 crore - a not extraordinary price for the artist whose better works have now settled in the Rs 2-crore plus category. For curators Chris Dercon and Nada Raz, getting Khakhar was a coup pointing to the artist's distinctiveness as well as a rising interest in India's modernists.
The Khakhar narrative skims closest to his identity as India's first openly gay artist who located male nudes in his Baroda neighbourhoods, thus playing on his own identity but with wit and sensitivity. The ordinariness of the subjects of his canvases is what recalled viewers' attention that found a reflection of Indian society in his observations amidst the sexual satire. Though sardonic, there is also warmth in these works, as can be seen in the 1981 painting You Can't Please All, which is also the title of the exhibition and at least partly recalls an Aesop's Fable while a nude man watches events unfold in the street below from his balcony.
Khakhar died of cancer in 2003 but his works have grown in importance not least because he has been referred to as India's David Hockney. What seems to have got Jones's knickers in a twist is that artists Hockney, Howard Hodgin and Frank Auerbach have had to make do with retrospectives at the Tate Britain, while Khakhar has been honoured at Tate Modern. "What makes this an odd exhibition for Tate Modern to put on is that Khakhar so strongly resembles the kind of British painter it would never let through its doors," he observes.
Perhaps Mr Jones has failed to realise that the Raj ended 70 years ago and this kind of unexplained racism is as undesirable as it is unexplained. Certainly, other critics seem to have responded with considerable warmth to the artist's works, and the numbers who're queuing up to see the retrospective supported by the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art should validate the curatorial decision. Certainly, I'll be in that line myself to buy my ticket at the entrance of the Tate Modern for a dekho - which is a greater vindication of a critic's unwarranted vituperative stand than any other response might be.
Kishore Singh is a Delhi-based writer and art critic. These views are personal and do not reflect those of the organisation with which he is associated
