Show featuring Air India's famed art collection takes off at NGMA Mumbai

In the first in a series of planned exhibitions, 200 works selected from Air India's 4,000-large art collection are on display at the gallery

The legend goes that the artist B Prabha, fresh out of Sir JJ School of Art in the 1950s, had walked into the Air India office to find a buyer for her pensive paintings of rural women. The airline promptly picked up at least six pieces — for 87 rupees and 8 annas each — and developed an appetite both for the practice of collecting art and for more of B Prabha’s paintings. 

Before all the recent talk about artificial intelligence in art, the only ‘AI’ that deeply influenced the art world was Air India. The Tata Group-founded airline grew into one of the most prolific institutional patrons for artists in post-Independent India, especially those from the Bombay Progressive Artists’ Movement including VS Gaitonde and MF Husain, who were compensated for their brushwork with funds or flight tickets.

 

 

‘Maharaja’s Treasure’, a show glimpsing that famed collection, went on display at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai on June 13.

The artworks officially passed into the care of NGMA in early 2023, as the government began disinvesting in the carrier. Air India was acquired in January 2022 by the Tata Group, which also owned the airline from inception until 1953 when the government decided to nationalise air carriers. JRD Tata, and later Ratan Tata, remained involved as chairperson or member of the board, and the tradition of art collection continued. 

The artist-Air India relationship was symbiotic. Artists benefited from steady work and subsidies, and the airline, for its part, got unique pieces to show off at its lounges and booking offices around the world. It allowed the airline to pitch itself globally as a ‘royal’ Indian carrier. As such, several of the works, including those playing on the turbaned Maharaja mascot, had a self-Orientalist quality that exoticised India. 

“Documentation of the artworks is still on,” said NGMA Director Nazneen Banu. That means the provenance of some of the works remains to be established, and as such, stories like the one about B Prabha are yet to be confirmed or catalogued. “The collection has been handed over to NGMA because we can conserve and put it in the public domain. This first exhibition showcases the modern Bombay Progressive masters, so the Mumbai public has got the first right to see it. There will be many exhibitions curated out of the collection,” Banu adds.

The collection has about 4,000 works now, but it was once likely as large as 7,000. The airline rushed to audit its treasures in 2017 when it came to light that lots of them had gone missing. Not just placed on walls, art was integrated into the airline’s day-to-day branding too, through tickets, in-flight storybooks, first-class menus, the sarees of air hostesses. These, however, are not part of the current display, which limits itself to 200 paintings and sculptures that were in exhibition-ready shape. 

Hinting at the collection’s international expanse, a multi-panel Husain canvas hangs in the main hall, metres away from a surrealist ceramic ashtray, designed by Salvador Dali in the 1960s in exchange for the equally surreal gift of a baby elephant. The shell-shaped and blue serpent-rimmed ashtray is propped up by elephant heads, which become swans when looked at upside down.

Three of B Prabha's modernist portraits, of women dressed in traditional Kashmiri, Maharashtrian and Rajasthani garb, are on the second floor, dedicated to works by and of women. Among them is Arpana Caur’s ‘Women hold up half the sky’, in which the pan used to transport construction materials sits on a woman’s head, resembling a blue crescent moon.

The next section features paintings of scale — such as abstract mindscapes by SG Vasudev, as well as stark landscapes of Ladakh by Serbjeet Singh. Two Anjolie Ela Menon paintings, ‘Nawab with pigeon’ and ‘Lady with kite’, both framed inside wooden windows and both symbolising a desire to break free, dominate the mezzanine floor. The bird theme continues in the gnarly metal roosters sculpted by Pilloo Pochkhanawala and Raghav Kaneria.

The exhibition ends with pieces marking celebration – such as Laxman Pai’s ‘Christmas in Goa’, K H Ara’s ‘Holi’, 15th-century stone figurines of celestial musicians, and a mid-20th-century metal sculpture of Nataraja, the Hindu god of dance.

The show, whose opening was originally planned for April 27, was put off after state mourning was declared following the death of former Punjab chief minister, Parkash Singh Badal. On view until August 13, it may be extended further.