As New York's Guggenheim Museum preps for a VS Gaitonde retrospective, the curator-collector community - and his buddies - chew over what makes him the poster boy of modern Indian art.
In 1998, Sandhini Poddar, a Masters student at the Ananthacharya Indological Research Institute in Mumbai, visited the National Gallery of Modern Art to view an exhibition of celebrated collector, Jehangir Nicholson. The show included nine paintings by abstract painter Vasudeo S Gaitonde.
She remembers it as a deeply moving experience. "What I walked away with that evening," says Poddar on a recent Mumbai visit, "was an incredible sense of silence, and a thought - if I ever became a museum curator, I'd like to exhibit a full retrospective of Gaitonde's work."
A decade later in 2011, when as associate curator, Asian Art, at New York's Solomon R Guggenheim, she suggested the idea to the museum - two years before Gaitonde became the artist to acquire after a 1971 oilon-canvas by him fetched Rs 23.7 cr at Christie's - the proposal took a while to clear. "Gaitonde", she says, "wasn't a name recognisable to them at all."
"Although, in the last 13 years after his death in 2001, the market has been supportive of his work, there was no scholarship to substantiate the interest," says Poddar. "No one had seriously researched his work or his position within the history of abstraction in India."
Much of the convincing unfolded here in India in March, when the museum's director, Richard Armstrong, came on a visit. The two hopped between the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art and other public spaces that host Gaitonde's work. Armstrong, she says, realised, here was a great artist who required a world art platform, and was happy to offer Guggenheim. "You don't sense a Gaitonde from an image; you only apprehend his work by standing in front of it."
V. S. Gaitonde: Painting as Process, Painting as Life opens at the Guggenheim on October 24 for three-anda-half- months. It will display 45 of his pieces, placing one of India's greatest modernists in a global art context, whilst looking at European traditions of modernity, Post War abstraction in America, and Indian modernism in the 40s and the decades after independence.
Those who knew him say, a retrospective at Guggenheim wouldn't have surprised him.
"Gaitonde was supremely confident. He just was," says Mumbai gallerist and auctioneer Dadiba Pundole. "To him, what mattered was the last completed work and the one he was about to paint. After a painting left his door, he didn't think about it. You could burn it for all he cared."
Old friend and colleague, New Delhi-based artist, Krishen Khanna agrees with Pundole. Gaitonde was certainly not the one to cater to the market or pander to somebody's taste. "He lived the life of a painter," Khanna believes.
Born in 1924 in Nagpur to Goan parents, Gaitonde was an infant when his father, who worked in a printing press, moved to their ancestral village. It's here in Goa that he spent the first five years before they moved to Mumbai. Art, somewhere, made an early presence. In Narendra Dengle's 1998-article, republished in Bodhana's An Unstretched Canvas, the writer quotes Gaitonde, where he speaks about a childhood surrounded by paddy fields: "I clearly remember one of my family members who used to paint on temple walls. Perhaps that was what first attracted me to painting. It was around the same time that I began to paint and realised that I also could draw! I came to Bombay while I was still a student and enrolled into a municipal school and before I knew I was visiting art galleries, looking at exhibitions."
His father, however, had little regard for his passion. He hoped the only son among four daughters would become a doctor. So, when Gaitonde joined Sir JJ School of Art, he had to live under the staircase of their building in Girgaum, where his mother sent him meals, shares Pundole. "He never spoke about family."
In fact, in an interview with a national daily published early this year, Gaitonde's younger sister, Kishori Das said he had broken ties with them soon after he moved to Delhi in the 1960s, and never left an address behind. They only learnt of his death in 2001, days after he passed away.
There's a tale of a love he lost, but Khanna says, "Gai moved to Delhi because Bombay became too expensive for him. Tyeb (Mehta) and he would share a cup of tea at the Bhulabhai Desai Institute because they couldn't afford to buy one for themselves."
In his youth, Pundole says, Gaitonde was flamboyant. Although conscious of his short height, he enjoyed ballroom dancing, watched cricket, and as opposed to popular perception about frugalness, "he was extremely fond of good clothes, colour and paint," Khanna adds.
In a forthcoming book on the artist, researched and authored by Delhi-based writer and curator, Meera Menezes, she mentions a 1964 incident involving Khanna and Gaitonde, when the two were in New York. "Commercially, Khanna and Gaitonde did fairly well in New York, and both artists shared a long-standing arrangement, in case either was lucky enough to sell a work. Khanna had promised Gaitonde that if he managed a sale, he would treat him to a shirt. As it transpired, Khanna did sell a painting, and he went to a store with Gaitonde to honour his promise. "I saw a five-dollar shirt and said, 'That is a nice shirt,' recalled Khanna, but Gai retorted, 'No, no, I want a twenty-dollar shirt!' Quite clearly, he was not going to be fobbed off with just any ordinary garment!"
"He was known to be arrogant. In fact, he'd often say, in third person, 'when Gai shows, Bombay comes to see'," smiles Pundole, while recalling an incident that sealed Gaitonde's relationship with his father and gallerist Kali Pundole. Eventually, Pundole became his sole representative for more than two decades. "It was during the emergency in 1974. He had a show at the Taj Art Gallery. Nobody showed up on the evening of the opening and he was livid." Bal Chhabda, the only visitor, made an SOS call to Kali, who ended up buying all the works.
Unlike many artists of his generation, Gaitonde wasn't trying to answer the larger questions of life through figurative works. Although he was briefly involved with the Progressive Art Group and the Bombay Group, and deeply inspired by Swiss-German painter Paul Klee, by the late 50s, he had veered away from figuration towards nonobjective art. According to Poddar, the 60s became the crux of his practice. "That's when he was developing and mastering a non-objective approach," she says. "Gaitonde became interested in Zen Buddhism and certain philosophers like J Krishnamurti and Nisargadatta Maharaj, who informed his life, practice and choices."
Vienna-based collector, Eleonore Chowdhury-Haberl, who between her three daughters and herself owns eleven works by Gaitonde dated l954 to l966, defines them as, "landscapes of the mind. Paintings that baffled and fascinated us and made us meditate over them."
To many, in the 60s and 70s, Gaitonde's monochromatic, dreamlike canvases began to resemble his American contemporary Mark Rothko. But he didn't appreciate the comparison. Chowdhury-Haberl remembers, "One evening, when looking at an art book with images of Rothko's works, I told him, 'Gaitonde, your works remind me of Mark Rothko'. He wryly responded, 'Do you mean to say, that I am copying?'"
From the early 70s to the late 80s, the silhouetting and overlapping of forms became ever more evident in Gaitonde's paintings; as distinguished from his quiet, meditative works of the 60s. As a consequence of a serious accident in 1984, Gaitonde stuck briefly to making ink on paper drawings in the mid 80s. It was only in 1989 that he returned to working on his larger oils-on-canvas, and the last works from 1997 and 1998 prominently include the circle and the line once again,"formative symbols from his appreciation of Zen," says Poddar.
Khanna puts it in perspective when he says, "there are a lot of correlations I see between how Gaitonde lived, how he worked and his art; which is as an interaction between that which is known and that which is not."
A non-prolific career stretching over four decades was marked by periods of productivity with spells of comfortably doing nothing. "In late 90s, when I visited Gai at his studio in Delhi, I kept prodding him to paint. And he said he has limited energy. He made pictures in his head and didn't want to waste his energy putting them on canvas," says Pundole.
He needed time for his many passions. He was a voracious reader, a lover of cinema and western classical music. Armstrong, says Poddar, observed that there was a musicality to all his work, "not realising that Gaitonde had western classical music playing in his studio all the time."
Chowdhury-Harberl, who along with husband Bilwa Kanta, shared a close association with Gaitonde, remembers him as, "a very quiet, reticent person who rarely spoke about his work". "When I once asked him — I was a young, naive woman then — about the meaning of one of his abstract works, he said, 'I cannot talk about my work. I just paint'."
Always curt with those who invaded his time, he even disciplined maverick M F Husain. Curator and consultant Jesal Thacker remembers artist Ram Kumar mentioning how Husain, who was never certain of his whereabouts, made sure he was on time when he had to meet Gaitonde.
"One always needed an excuse to talk to Gaitonde," says Pundole. "Besides," says Khanna, "if the discussion on art was stupid, as it mostly is, he'd prefer to keep quiet."
Flattery never went down well with him, and money wasn't a concern. Paris-based filmmaker Sunil Kaldate, who released a film on the artist back in the 90s, narrated an incident to Menezes, which she has included in her book published by Bodhana: "... Kaldate remembers that on one of his visits he spied a plastic bag lying around the studio in which there was a packet wrapped in paper. Assuming that there might be some chocolates inside, he opened the packet only to discover, to his utter amazement, a wad of money. Apologising profusely to Gaitonde for the intrusion, the latter stunned him with his simple retort, 'think of it as a chocolate!'"
Whether it was his work or life, Gaitonde valued restraint. "In fact, when I asked Ram Kumar what a retrospective would mean to Gaitonde, he said, 'he'd be happy', and I thought that's quite restrained for a response, but then again, it reflects who he was," says Poddar.
See Pic:
1. Meera Menezes, who took this picture in Delhi in 1997 when she interviewed Gaitonde, says, "He definitely didn't look as severe as he did in his photographs. I found him charming, not the dour, stern man I'd expected to meet."
2. Curator Sandhini Poddar says it was a while before the upcoming Guggenheim retrospective of Gaitonde was cleared because "no one has seriously researched his work or his position within the history of abstraction in India"
3. V. S. Gaitonde, Untitled, 1955
(Chowdhury Family Collection, Vienna-Mumbai)
Vienna-based collector Eleonore Chowdhury-Harbel, along with husband Bilwa Kanta and nuclear scientist Dr Homi Bhabha was one of the few collectors of Gaitonde's work in the early 60s. "Each Sunday, we'd visit his studio - first at the Bulabhai Desai Institute on Warden Road, then Walkeshwar. Often, he'd come to our Marine Drive home where we'd regularly invite Bombay art lovers and connoisseurs to show them our latest acquisitions. Gaitonde was always there, and in fact, through our parties, he was able to make his work known to new buyers," she says.
