In 1995, filmmaker Sunil Kaldate at the behest of artist SH Raza went to VS Gaitonde’s barsati in Nizamudin East, Delhi, to make a documentary film on him. A peeved Gaitonde refused to even acknowledge him. Kaldate presented himself again on Gaitonde’s doorstep the next day. The Modernist master relented but with a few conditions: he would not perform for the camera, he should not be asked any questions and he should not be disturbed in any way. The resultant 27-minute film is a tussle between Gaitonde’s silence and Kaldate’s desperate attempt to impose a soundscape, to make sense. We are presented with a portrait of the artist in which the artist reveals only what he wants to of himself — a finished canvas and not the act of painting itself. He does let us in on his process: a long wait with a cigarette in his hand and head tilted upwards.
Kaldate’s film, titled VS Gaitonde (1995), was screened at the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York, as part of the exhibition ‘VS Gaitonde: Painting as Process, Painting as Life’. This is the first-ever museum exhibition and retrospective dedicated to Gaitonde (1924-2001). The exhibition, curated by Sandhini Poddar, adjunct curator at the museum, with curatorial assistance by Amara Antilla, consists of 45 works from 1953 to 1997.
Gaitonde has always been a seminal figure in the narrative of Indian Modernism. A graduate of JJ School of Art, Bombay, and Raza’s classmate, he was part of the Progressive Artists’ Group that included Raza, FN Souza, MF Husain, Tyeb Mehta, Ram Kumar and others.
The gallerists and collectors who supported the other Progressives supported Gaitonde as well. Yet, in the writing of Indian art history, Gaitonde was sidelined for numerous reasons.
Poddar suggests this was because the Indian art market took off only after Gaitonde’s death. “Had he been alive when the art market in India had started developing, he would have received more institutional support in terms of exhibitions and scholarship,” she says. This can’t be the only reason as Souza, who died in 2002, a year after Gaitonde, enjoyed more visibility. Also, several exhibition catalogues of the ’70s and ’80s prove how writers and artists critically engaged with and wrote about the oeuvre of their contemporaries. Maybe one of the reasons is that Gaitonde did not fit into the postcolonial, subaltern or feminist narratives that Indian art history was exploring. The current narrative put into function by the Guggenheim — through the catalogue, the programming and the American press — both Orientalises Gaitonde as the silent Zen master and gives him art-historical importance by placing him in the tradition of abstractionists Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Mark Rothko. This again may not be doing justice to the artist.
Gaitonde the artist, like Gaitonde the man, needs to be looked at in dialogue with his peers. It is uncanny how beautifully some of his landscapes from the late ’50s and early ’60s resonate with the same concerns that fellow artists Ram Kumar and Raza were struggling with: the river, the city on its bank, the sun unstable in heavy waters. It is important that we explore what made these artists converge and what made Gaitonde diverge, if and when he did.
The Guggenheim announced the exhibition in 2012, and there has since been a flurry of excitement in the Indian art world. In December 2013, at Christie’s debut auction in Mumbai, a work by Gaitonde that was estimated at ₹8.5 crore eventually sold for ₹23.7 crore. And more recently, in September 2014, two Gaitonde works sold for more than ₹6 crore each at Bonhams’ Indian, Himalayan and Southeast Asian auction.
The revaluing of Gaitonde is not limited to the market alone but has generated interest in scholarship as well. The Bodhana Arts Foundation, Mumbai, will release art critic Meera Menezes’ work Vasudeo S Gaitonde, A Biographical and Comparative Research in two volumes next year.
While these are positive outcomes, this exhibition itself, tucked away in a corner of the Guggenheim, leaves one dissatisfied. In fact, with 45 works, this is the biggest-ever exhibition of his works. However, it still seems far too little for an artist whose career spanned around 45 years and who made around five or six works every year. Even the publication that accompanies the exhibition has images of only 69 works. “It was difficult to trace all the works since we had to do everything from scratch. We brought in those that were in public collections and as many as we could from private collections,” Poddar says in defence of the museum.
Some of the best paintings by the Modernists are in private collections around the world. There is no documentation of these art pieces in the public domain, and in a retrospective, one hopes that the interested viewer will come to know of them. The missing works, however, are more an administrative problem that the Guggenheim cannot be singled out for. But what about older exhibition catalogues, newspaper clippings, letters or photographs? Surely, these have a place in a retrospective that aims to be the first step in scholarship on the artist. In the end, we are left with only a few of Gaitonde’s works. Maybe that is how he would have liked it...
(The exhibition runs till February 11, 2015, at the Guggenheim, New York.)
(Blessy Augustine is an art critic currently based in New York)