Masanori Fukuoka is no stranger to collecting circles in India though purists might argue that his Glenbarra Art Museum in Hijemi, Japan, underscores his collecting for its own sake, that it at least empowers his indulgence. That contention might be valid, but what is important is that under the umbrella of Glenbarra, Masanori aims to document and popularise Indian artists the Japanese public would otherwise remain oblivious of. These efforts, in the past, have resulted in a book on Jogen Chowdhury, but it is interesting that its more recent tome should be on Ved Nayar, who as an artist has had to struggle to find recognition outside of immediate collecting circles even in India.
Masanori had started buying up Nayar’s works in the early Nineties, at a time when he was collecting blue-chip masters, and would eventually set off the big ticket buys at auctions with his historical bid of Rs 1.5 crore for Tyeb Mehta’s “Celebration”. Masanori saw “by chance” Nayar’s drawings in an auction and thought well enough of them to start acquiring these — the book, the first on Nayar and the first of a set on Nayar by Masanori, is limited to just his drawings — and back home in Japan, at his gallery, viewers “rated his works in my collection and his creativity very high”.
That was just the impetus Masanori required, and over the next two years, he writes in Drawings, Evolving Human Form, he had “bought all the drawings, paintings and sculptures of Ved Nayar”. It is not that Nayar was unknown to gallerists in India, but the disappearance of his works into a Japanese home meant that galleries back home realised his worth, and started pushing his canvases more assertively, though Nayar had all but stopped drawing, which many still consider his key strength. For those familiar with his “Icon”, a towering figure, usually female, that looms large over people and horizons, the drawings in the book made between 1977 and 1993 provide the genesis and trajectory of that singular identity from amidst his multi-armed, hydra-headed figures.
While the book suffers from the lack of an editor, it does not lack in ideas, and Nayar is particularly pungent in some of his remarks, chiefly those with regard to artists who chose to settle in the West, such as F N Souza. About him, Nayar writes, “I wish he had not formed the Progressive Group. I wish he had remained in India. I wish he had also opened his eyes and creative sensibilities instead of taking a reaction[ary] stance towards the creative visual directions evolved by Indian artists from their soil” — Souza was particularly scathing of the Bengal revivalists — “like Nandalal Bose, Rabindranath Tagore, Binode Behari Mukherjee and the like.”
For Nayar, the “Asian nuances of creativity” then, as now, when he sees India, Japan, Korea and Iran as older civilisations with “immense creative visual resource” at a time when “the West has over-utilised its creative visual energy”, could show the way and take the onus of leadership. This is perhaps already the direction being taken by the Nayar-Masanori partnership, but for us the takeaway is twofold. One, that a century ago the Bengal artists had already claimed a collective Asian artistic sensitivity and heritage that was soon after rejected by the Bombay modernists (in particular), but now seems to be entertaining a second coming. And, two, that just as Masanori does, Indian collectors need to start documenting both their collections and the artists in whom they most invest to encourage both art scholarship as well as the market.
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
