Ashish Anand wants his gallery to become an institute for everything to do with Indian and modern art
On January 19, Delhi Art Gallery will open its revamped and much augmented space at its original Hauz Khas address in Delhi with ‘Continuum’, a landmark show with over 250 works by the six artists who founded the seminal Progressive Artists Group — Souza, Husain, Raza, Bakre, Ara and Gade. This will be the first time in more than six decades that the “Progressives” will be showing together.
For Ashish Anand, the gallery’s 40-year-old director, this show, the handsome and well-researched books that accompany it, and the new facilities that DAG will offer — a library, lounge, sculpture court — are the culmination of a vision that he’s been working towards for the past 10 years or so. Mostly, it involved buying “truckloads” of art from all over the country.
Anand’s involvement with DAG, started by his mother Rama, goes back to around 1996. He had little training in or experience of art, but he recognised early the disparities in the Indian art market, that while a handful of artists went for high prices, there were many who had done good work but had no market at all. “Buying these artists, do shows and publications on them and making their market rather than go after the known names” became his agenda.
The first few years went in “travelling, meeting people, artists, visiting museums... training my eye,” says Anand. Then, sometime in 1999-2000, armed with Rs 30-40 lakh from his family corpus, he began buying. For about 25 days a month, Anand would be travelling all over India, buying out studios and collections, and networking avidly. Often he’d find treasures in the unlikeliest of places. In Varanasi, Anand recalls, a man just brought out “a potli which had 50-60 paintings — a Rabindranath, a Ramkinker Baij... He was a student in Shantiniketan.” This frenetic buying was focussed first on the Bengal school, but widened later to include pre-Independence painters from Mumbai, the south and other parts of India, and since 2005, the Progressives. It continues even now; a few years ago, Anand acquired the entire oeuvre of Nemai Ghosh, and last year, bought out an entire show of Bireshwar Sen.
Today, Anand has the largest collection of Indian art — 27,000 works. (In contrast, NGMA has only 17,000 works.) Not just that, he has personal photographs, letters, press clippings, art books and journals, and catalogues. His ambition now — to build an “institution that will be the most comprehensive anywhere in the world for Indian and modern art of the last 100 years”.
So he’s been adding to his own extensive repository digital photographs of auction catalogues from all over the world as also artworks and other material in regional museums and universities. DAG has already digitised the archives in north Indian states and will soon start working on museums all across the country. The goal is to use this material to authenticate and validate artworks. It’s Anand’s way of giving back to the art world.
