A view of a gallery at the NGMA, New Delhi. IMAGE COURTESY THE NGMA.

A HISTORY OF NOW
Kavita Singh reflects on the evolution of the art museum in post-Independence India and assesses what it means to be trapped in ‘the historical modern’.

MODERN ART MUSEUMS IN NON-WESTERN LANDS

In the summer of 1976, Imelda Marcos went shopping. Not for shoes, as one would expect: no, this time the wife of the Philippine dictator was trawling through museums, galleries and private collections in New York and Washington, looking for art loans for the opening show of the Metropolitan Museum of Manila. Assembled in a mere four weeks, this museum was housed in a hurriedly converted military building. It had no collection of its own, and indeed it needed none, since its remit was to show exclusively ‘non-Philippine’ art through borrowed examples of Western modernism.

Mrs. Marcos’ museum was put together to a deadline, as its opening was to be a cultural sidelight to an important IMF-World Bank meeting in Manila that eventually sanctioned more funds to prop up the Marcos dictatorship. If the museum’s stated aim was “to broaden our people’s awareness of the cultures of the world,ⁱ perhaps its real purpose lay in displaying the Marcoses to the gathered bankers as enlightened autocrats capable of bringing modernity to their corner of the world.

The head of the Visual Arts Center of Qatar seen visiting The Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, inaugurated by the Shah of Iran in 1978. On display is a painting by the American Abstract Expressionist Jackson Pollock.

Elsewhere in Asia, another dictator was assembling a modern art museum at more or less the same time. Unlike the museum in Manila, however, his institution was not an empty shell: its collection was a roll-call of modernist masters, from Pissarro through Picasso to Pollock. This large collection was said to have been acquired at a cost of $30 million, a startlingly large sum at the time. This, the most important collection of modern western art outside the west, was purchased for the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, an institution that was inaugurated by the Shah of Iran in 1978, just months before his fall. As a critic suggests, the Shah needed such 'Western-style museums to complete the facade of modernity he constructed for Western eyes.' ⁱⁱ

The Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art was only one of several of the Shah's projects that brought western avant-garde art to Iran even as his regime suppressed free speech and political dissent among the Iranian people. Through the 1970s Iran also witnessed the Shiraz Performing Arts Festival, which hosted the likes of Merce Cunningham and John Cage in Iran; the vanguardism of their performances, in turn, stirred a powerful reaction that contributed to the Islamic Revolution of 1979.ⁱⁱⁱ With the Islamic Revolution, the Shiraz Festival was suspended, but the Tehran Museum's western art collection was not destroyed or dispersed; it remains in the Tehran MOCA but is mostly kept in storage away from the public gaze.^iv

The Metropolitan Museum of Manila and the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art illustrate one form taken by the museum of modern art in the non-western world. In the vision that shapes these museums, modernism and modernity are assumed to belong to, and be entirely constituted by, the west. In these circumstances, a museum of modern art inevitably is a museum of western art. Bringing canonised examples of modernism from Paris or New York to Manila and Tehran, these museums make little or no reference to local art production, which is assumed by definition to be excluded from the circuits of both modernity and modernism. Of course, it is no coincidence that our two examples of museums of this sort - museums of modernism from above - were planted in their countries by autocratic rulers, whose client-relationship with western powers alienated them from their own countrymen, even as they made them appear to the outside world as enlightened despots capable of bringing modernity to their own backward nations.

In contrast, museums like India's National Gallery of Modern Art illustrate the other, inverse, paradigm for modern art museums built outside the west. India's National Gallery limits itself to tracing modernity as it was enacted since the mid-19^th Century within what are now the boundaries of the Indian nation state. By collecting and displaying art made by modern Indian artists, and to a lesser extent, by non-Indian artists working in India, the NGMA tells the story of a localised, non-western modernity in art.

Indeed, in the National Gallery's story of Indian art, it is western influence that is marginal, for it seems only to provide the initial germ for genres and movements that then grow organically in the native soil. In a narrative that mimics Alfred Barr's (in)famous characterization of the history of modern western art as a series of movements in revolt against their predecessors, in India's National Gallery of Modern Art, we see the colonial importation of academic painting as a first intimation of the 'modern' in Indian art. In time, this is supplanted by the indigenist Bengal School; the Bengal School's nostalgic mode is rejected by Sher- Gil, and later, by the Bombay Progressives; their aggressive, expressionistic forms are cast aside by abstractionists, some of whom produce an indigenous abstraction in the 'neo-Tantra' mode; abstraction's disengagement from the world then acts as a spur for the politically committed new narrative painters; so on and so forth. The story of modern Indian art is retold as an internal dialogue between Indian players; here, the west appears as an occasional resource for motifs and styles, rather than as the fount and source of modernity itself.

Perhaps, the idea of a more or less insular national-modern art seems artificial - modernism is, after all, about connections and transgressions, not about nationally-bounded legacies and heritages. And yet, the occurrence of this kind of modern art museum upon the Indian soil is no accident. The National Gallery of Modern Art is one of many instruments that India has used in her long project of claiming modernity for herself. For, as Partha Chatterjee says, it was soon understood in colonial India that 'Given the close complicity between modern knowledges and modern regimes of power, we should ever remain consumers of universal modernity; never would we be taken seriously as its producers. It is for this reason that we have tried, for over a hundred years, to take our eyes away from this chimera of universal modernity and clear up a space where we might become creators of our own modernity.' ^v