Renu Modi celebrates twenty years of life as a gallerist with an ambitious show, a glimpse of what lies ahead, and a wish to return to the hearth.
Annoyance suits her personality. Impatience could be her middle name. She blames it on her “perfectionism”. Others might insist it’s a lack of diplomacy. “If I don’t like a show, I say it to the artist’s face,” she confirms. “I don’t agree that Indian art has become global,” she adds over a Chinese lunch that’s vaguely dissatisfying for being vegetarian, “all that’s nonsense!” The order for lunch has been peremptory: she pooh-poohs any suggestions from the maître-d, “not this, not this”, settling on green beans (good choice) and mixed vegetables in a black bean sauce, and a lemon coriander soup that turns out to be boiled water with cornflour thickening unlivened even by salt. But there’s enough sizzle in the conversation to flambé the meal with wit and vitriol — sadly, most of it off-record.
Renu Khaitan became Renu Modi while still in school, a conservative Calcutta Marwari who became a Modinagar bahu and witnessed a whole new view of life. It isn’t as if the Modis weren’t conservative, but they were a big industrial house, well-travelled, and liked the opulent lifestyle. “One table at [the restaurant] Volga would always be reserved for us,” recalls Modi now, and it is here they would meet the capital’s glitterati or business community on their visits from Modinagar.
“My brother-in-law used to collect art,” she recollects, and it is him she would accompany as he left the table at Volga to step across to Dhoomimal’s, the city’s oldest art gallery. She remembers a large work by Bikash Bhattacharjee that particularly fascinated her “even then”, and instinctively she sought out works by Shanti Dave while — she says this with a shudder — the family thought the Jaipur-based artist Jaya Wheaton’s kitschy creations most suitable for their sprawling drawing rooms.
When the Modis shifted their homes to New Delhi, they began to acquire serious art — M F Husain, of course, and Anjolie Ela Menon, J Swaminathan, Laxma Goud, Manu Parekh and others. “I liked good art intuitively,” she says, and with Husain now a familiar fixture in their lives, it seemed almost natural when he said he wanted to design their house for them. It wasn’t the kind of offer you said no to, even though Husain mocked them later, saying, “You’re fools for letting me experiment with your money.”
By this time Modi’s two boys were 12 and 10 years old, she’d been pushed by her husband, “DK”, to complete her college through correspondence, and maybe the time was right for her to move out of the kitchen and away from the garden to something more concrete. It was Husain, again, who was responsible for the shift when he said, “Tum gallery khol do.”
That was easier said than done, but it was a tempting idea — and perhaps in the beginning it was no more than a rich woman’s idle contemplation of something to do. Husain designed the logo and Gallery Espace was born, in the same place in New Friends Colony that it occupies now, only it is much larger and spread over a couple of floors. The first show was, quite naturally, Husain’s, and it was the artist who kept her up-to-date on the politics and camps within the art fraternity. “He would get Manu Parekh home, take me to [N S] Bendre’s home, only to be admonished, “Tum kyon isko art ke dal-dal mein daal rahe ho?”
Delhi — this was 1989 — was still insular, and art a rich person’s fancy but also not to be taken too seriously. Twenty years later, as Modi and Gallery Espace prepare for their anniversary show on magic realism, it is a different world out there. Smaller galleries have mushroomed, art — good, bad and indifferent — is everywhere, prices have spiraled, crashed and are rising again, mediums have undergone a major metamorphosis, and Modi, who has survived it, even pioneered some of it, says she’s glad she learned things the hard way.
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“When Manjit Bawa came into my life,” she says, “he became my mentor.” That’s when a housewife’s hobby turned into passion. She did not herself hoard art, she says, because she was not interested in the investment part of the business, “perhaps because I didn’t need the money”. But she used it as a learning exercise, gaining from art critic K K Nair’s conversations on art aesthetics. “I started showing only the art I liked,” she says of the way she evolved. “I always had an open mind.”
While her interaction had been almost completely with the masters, she did shows with emerging contemporary artists, pointing to the response to the popular Kitsch Kitsch Hota Hai as a turning point. Installations, video art, new media followed. Through it all she retained her sense of the dismissive, challenging aesthetics she didn’t respond to scathingly. Did it hurt her professionally? “Husain sa’ab told me that I should not be openly critical,” she cracks a quick smile, “I don’t like to degrade artists, but my brusqueness has helped artists correct their course,” she names some instances. “How can I just dump anything on the public? My artists don’t mind if I’m rude to them.”
It must concern her there is no succession plan for Espace. Her sons aren’t interested in the business, and there’s no one who can take on the mantle when she feels the need to pass on the yoke. “I don’t want it to fade away,” the sigh is involuntary, “I would not like it to pass into strange hands.” So while she would like to professionalise it so it can be handed over to professionals to run, she says that in the future Espace needs to be more in the “boutique gallery” space. “I have been focusing on women painters,” she muses — no offence to male artists implied — “because their approach is fascinating. But I want to expand into art outreach, into art education, maybe residencies [at the Modi home in Govardhan], “documentation definitely”, even perhaps an arts institution that moves “from the micro into the macro space”.
If the journey has been a learning experience, it hasn’t been without its share of controversies, not least of which were accusations of fake Somnath Hore works by the artist’s family, a charge she still stoutly denies, and then shares, sotto voce, information about artists who condone fakes, others who take money to provide authentication: a sign of the lack of transparency in the market. If she’s calmer about these issues now — and she insists that she is — “it’s because I’m more philosophical, more spiritual, and look within myself” for solutions. Her husband, “my great support” such as when she couldn’t attend family functions because her work gave her no respite, leans to his guru, and she to hers. “He’s beyond body and mind,” she describes the sage near Paonta Sahib to whom she turns for solace, “he’s in silence.”
Meanwhile, she wonders whether she can return to cooking — “it’s therapeutic for me, gives me great pleasure” — and claim back some of the pleasures of “being domesticated”, this time she laughs self-consciously. On balance: she was shy once, she’s confident now; she grew up in a cloistered environment but life has proved enriching beyond measure; she was likely to fly off the handle frequently but is meditative now. “But in growing professionally, I’d sacrificed on personal choices,” she says, “I’m still not free but look forward to doing the things that once” — long ago —interested her: “looking after the house, doing the flowers...”
If you’re tempted to ask why, you risk her return to a tirade again. “The art world is very material, material, material, material, material...” she sighs theatrically — perhaps a reflection of the magic realism of her upcoming show at Lalit Kala Akademi — “I want a little seclusion now.”
