Gilding on the frame

ANTIQUARY

Rare works are being aired at the golden jubilee celebrations of the National Gallery of Modern Art.

Professor Rajeev Lochan, director of the National Gallery of Modern Art, has reason to look smug. It is during his tenure that the gallery is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary and, short of some cataclysmic event, he should also oversee the completion and inauguration of its new wings in an extension building that has been on the anvil since the late 1980s.

Barely able to conceal his excitement, taking endless rounds of the galleries where the epochal exhibition will mark the event's opening on Monday, November 8, Prof Lochan points to a rare Company miniature that has just been hung, hovers close to a selection of Raja Deen Dayal's photographs, jabs in the direction of his selection of Daniells and Tilly Kettle in the rotunda of Jaipur House, before setting off to explore the Nandlal Boses and Tagores, the Shergils and Roerichs and Jamini Roys that he has curated from the gallery's reserve collection of 16,000-plus works.

It is these works President A P J Abdul Kalam will see when he inaugurates Signposts of the Times: The Golden Trail, 1954-2004 on Monday, the first of a series of similar exhibitions that will mark the NGMA's golden jubilee.

The repository of art that lies within the ambit of NGMA is understandably the largest such library of works in the country, but no attempt "" however notional "" has ever been attempted to place a value on the works either individually or collectively. Which is a pity. If the gallery were to have its archive professionally evaluated, given the increasing interest in art, it wouldn't be surprising if it drew the attention of the government purely on account of its worth.

"You can't really put a value to the collection," Prof Lochan argues, not entirely correctly, for recent years have shown that even priceless treasures have had a price put to them. And should the NGMA wish to appropriate interest in building larger, more secure spaces quicker than has happened in the case of the extension, then the suggestion that it is sitting on a nest-egg worth literally thousands of crores might do more to draw urgent government funds than almost any other argument.

The collection at the gallery, with a few exceptions in the case of European artists, begins from approximately the mid-19th century. And Prof Lochan has planned the exhibition loosely "as the transformation from tradition to modernity, with all the visual trajectories to see where we arrive". This means that the historic Jaipur House, which was first leased and later bought by the gallery, will have its original furniture from the toshakhana in place at the entrance rotunda, to set the tone for the inaugural exhibition.

The more important part of the celebrations will be the launch "" a first in Asia"" of a print-on-demand facility, in very high resolution, of the gallery's collection of Tagores and Shergills. "We've digitised their works," explains Prof Lochan, and an inhouse team of photographers are soon to begin the process of digitising the works of the rest of the NGMA collection. The philanthropy wing of Hewlett-Packard has been working with NGMA to make this possible.

In addition, the gallery is making available a range of memorabilia to coincide with the jubilee. Having tasted blood with the Rs 24 lakh it earned off the Picasso memorabilia it created around the Metamorphosis show in Delhi, it has created four portfolios of 10 works each of contemporary artists, so 40 printed works will become available to gallery visitors, as also a set of six coffee mugs, T-shirts and so on.

Artist Gopi Gajwani has also designed the new logo for the gallery that will be unveiled as part of the jubilee celebrations.

"The museum extension," says Prof Lochan, "will have a great deal of the kind of things that an institution of this stature requires." Already, he says, "every important museum of the world wants to work with the NGMA".

This means that, besides retrospectives of the kind held recently for artists K G Subramanyam and A Ramachandran (with another for Satish Gujral on the anvil), the gallery will both import as well as export collections as well as curated shows. "Signposts," he says, "is just the first of several landmark exhibitions."