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The magnificent collection of Jehangir Nicholson finally finds a home. —Saloni Doshi
On the evening of April 11, the doors to the Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation’s first exhibition, Six Decades: Celebrating the Bombay Artists from the Jehangir Nicholson Collection, opened at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS), formerly known as the Prince of Wales Museum in Mumbai.
It was an important moment in the history of post-colonial Indian art. Finally, one of India’s most passionate collectors was being given the respect and space he deserved in a gallery named after him. The works on display represent only a sliver of a collection that consists of close to 800 paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints acquired from 1968 to 2001 of 250 Indian artists. The oldest artwork dates back to 1930.
The current exhibition showcases works of Bombay artists such as Sadanand Bakre, Prabhakar Barwe, MF Husain, Francis Newton Souza, Adi Davierwalla, Tyeb Mehta, HA Gade, VS Gaitonde, Bhupen Khakhar, Jitish Kallat, Anju Dodiya, Atul Dodiya, Nalini Malani, Akbar Padamsee, Homi Patel, Sudhir Patwardhan, Gieve Patel, Piloo Pochkhanawalla, SH Raza, Jehangir Sabavala, Laxman Shreshtha, Mohan Samant and B Vithal.
Recalls Laxman Shreshtha, “In the 70s, when art collector Bill Chaudhary bought Souza’s master work Death of a Pope (now in the Nicholson collection) for one thousand rupees, Souza made a statement that he earns more money than the prime minister.”
Art consultant Amrita Jhaveri, a close friend of Nicholson, noted in a recent lecture on collectors of Indian art, “The archetypal but uncommon collectors in those days were Karl Khandalavala (with strong scholarly interests in Indian art, and a vigorous mentor to Amrita Sher-Gil in stimulating her interest in Indian art) and WG and Mildred Archer who collected works of Tagore and Jamini Roy — but they all had strong affiliations with established museums.” She describes how, in those early days, just two or three philanthropic collectors came to mind: the Viennese Emmanuel Schlesinger, head of Indo-Pharma, who found and paid for artists’ studio space in Bombay and also paid their medical bills. Homi Bhabha, the nuclear scientist, also supported struggling artists such as Husain, Raza and Souza. And the theatre director Ebrahim Alkazi, who recounted that as artists could not afford to rent a gallery space, he would rent it for them in return for getting his theatre sets painted. Such was the environment in which the Bombay Group struggled to make a living.
Nicholson had two main hobbies: car racing (in his seventies, he participated in the Himalayan Car Rally as co-driver to Auto Car magazine’s publisher Hormazd Sorabjee) and photography (though he himself did not like being a subject). Old timers remember Nicholson racing across the city in his blue BMW and participating in car rallies till his wife made him stop. “Despite the domestic fatwa, Jehangir continued to race under the pseudonym of Mr Cotton to avoid getting caught (since the results of the car race were printed in the paper),” says his nephew Cyrus Guzder. He was an avid traveller, curious about new cultures. It was through one of his many social activities at the Rotary Club of Bombay that he first encountered art.
After the weekly Rotary meeting on Tuesdays at the Taj Mahal Hotel’s Ball Room, many Rotarians would walk down the stairs to stroll through the Taj Art Gallery. Nicholson’s photographer eye was naturally drawn to landscapes, and one day in 1968, the work of a young artist named Sharad Waykool caught his eye. Like a good businessman, he bargained and bought it for Rs 500. It was then that he had pangs of conscience and resolved never again to haggle with an artist, who he felt was not a shopkeeper and had a different soul. He resolved to pay only by cheque, and practised this till his death.
Eager to learn, Nicholson was a frequent visitor at art galleries such as the Chemould, Pundole and the Jehangir, and had close friendships with many artists, notably Krishen Khanna and Laxman Shreshtha, who had just returned from Paris. “Nicholson visited my studio every evening for six years religiously and took me to all his parties and introduced me to his family,” recalls Shreshtha. “He was full of questions on art and was always curious to understand and educate himself on what is considered good and bad art. We travelled to Chennai, Kolkata, Delhi and across the country to expose him to the art world”. Being of birdlike build, all of five feet tall, Nicholson liked to introduce himself as R K Laxman’s Common Man. He met artists regularly and had extensive debates and arguments with them. He was obsessed with the idea of buying not just any exhibition-grade artwork, but works of “museum quality”. The word museum became part of his vocabulary in his last decade of collecting.
Nicholson was also an avid collector of women eccentricities of a collector. After spending a small fortune on a painting, he would try to save on courier costs, and once spent two hours trying to fit a large artwork into his car. He finally triumphed and drove it back home. He was obsessed with his art, even waking up his domestic help in the middle of the night to rearrange the paintings on the walls of his Worli bungalow.
In 1976, he founded a museum gallery for his collection at the NCPA, which was then named the Jehangir Nicholson Gallery of Modern Art, and donated substantially towards its infrastructure in the hope that one day it would house his entire collection. But this did not happen. He then curated his collection for a grand 1998 exhibition titled Collector’s Eye with the NGMA’s then director, Saryu Doshi.
More than anything, he wanted the public to be able to enjoy his collection. Zasha Colah, curator of the Jehangir Nicholson art Foundation (JNAF), says that in the last years of his life Nicholson spent his Sundays with architect Ratan Batliboi scouting for a space in South Mumbai for his museum. Batliboi later designed a sophisticated visible storage system with movable slides to further Nicholson’s idea of public ownership of his works. He did not want his magnificent collection to be enjoyed just by a few people. “He tried every trick in the book to ask the government for some land to house his collection,” says Colah. “He was inspired by the Chester and Davida Herwitz Collection, which is housed at the Peabody Essex Museum.”
He went on searching to the very end. He left directions that after his death his assets should be liquidated to support a foundation that would manage his art collection, appointing his most trusted people, his nephew Cyrus Guzder and his lawyer Kaiwan Kalyaniwalla, as trustees of the JNAF, and Dadiba and Khorshed Pundole, Ranjit Hoskote and artist Mehli Gobhai on the advisory board. Finding a public space after his death was not an easy task. Finally, thanks to the encouragement of Sabyasachi Mukherjee, the director of the CSMVS, the blueprint of the tiny museum commissioned by Nicholson, was executed. The CSMVS has given the JNAF 4,500 square feet of space on a 15-year loan. This is by far the best possible fate for Nicholson’s ambitious collection and for a man who spent a lifetime trying to build a dream museum. As Nicholson once said, “Art is the difference between what you look at and what the mind sees. Art is and will proliferate in India and in the world, it has no borders, only edges!”
The Jehangir Nicholson Gallery is open till August 28 with the show Six decades: Celebrating the Bombay Artists from the Jehangir Nicholson Collection