(http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14871424/site/newsweek/)
Sept. 25, 2006 issue - When Tyeb Mehta's painting "Mahishasura" sold at Christie's New York auction house last year for $1.6 million, artists and art dealers were stunned. In five years, Indian art prices had skyrocketed a thousand percent. Savvy Indian businessmen wanted a piece of the market. But one New Delhi entrepreneur had them beat: Amit Judge opened Bodhi art gallery in Singapore in 2004 because "there was no awareness of Indian art in Asia," he says. Bodhi galleries in Delhi and Mumbai followed. This month his flagship opens in the world's art capital, New York: with 560 square meters of prime space in Chelsea, Bodhi will stand alongside the prestigious Gagosian gallery.
At 48, Judge is an unlikely art-world visionary. The son of a navy man, he worked small jobs through college in Kolkata, then moved to Delhi to join a cousin's garment business. Frustrated with the family company, he struck out on his own, using his father's $200 pension as startup capital for a clothing company in 1987. Today his interests include construction, chemicals, investment, real estate, and Barista, a coffee chain that started as a tiny café. His ventures stretch from Mumbai to China. Last year, he sold Barista to the giant Tata conglomerate. Now "I spend most of my time on art," he says. "I find it exciting and enriching—the business opportunity's huge in Indian art because it's still nascent."
Judge ascribes his passion for art to his late wife, Nandita, whose family—owners of the Times of India—first invited Sotheby's to Mumbai in 1988 to auction modern art. That marked a turning point for Indian art by generating record prices. Judge got to know the top artists, and began collecting, even commissioning works; Mehta's "Celebration" hung in his office until a Japanese collector bought it in 2003. Though he sold many works after his wife's death in a helicopter crash in 2001, Judge retains a large collection of India's finest contemporary artists: Mehta, V. S. Gaitonde, F. N. Souza and Arpita Singh. Eventually he established Bodhi because "India's art is very good but our infrastructure is poor," he says. "The pipeline connecting the art and the artist to the collector—the gallery system—is weak."
Judge's galleries focus not on sales but on "education," exposing India's new art through shows of handpicked artists. He commissions projects and buys works outright—not on consignment—paying artists many times what other galleries do. His exhibits will be shown worldwide through Bodhi's spaces and loans to museums. "As the first corporate house to enter the art business, we'll play a quasi-institutional role," Judge says. "I'll have several shows shelved in our galleries that museums can borrow." He also publishes books, catalogs and CD-ROMs of his artists. "This is the role of institutions, but they don't do it in India so we must do it," he says.
Judge may love art but, above all, he is a shrewd investor. "The arts of a country follow its political and economic importance," he says. "As India gains world stature, so will its arts—they'll ride the country's GDP. Our artists are fantastic, so we must develop art as business." Artists appreciate all the attention. "Amit's concern is not primarily with money; he's artist-friendly," says Atul Dodiya, who will be featured at Bodhi's first show in New York. "He realizes that art entails dealing with sensitive human beings, not just objects."
Few artists have benefited more from Judge's nurturing than Dodiya. The entrepreneur sponsored his residency at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute in 2005, where he worked with a Japanese printmaker and an American papermaker to develop colorful "wet on wet" paper-pulp works. His New York exhibit of those pieces, "The Wet Sleeves of My Paper Robe" (the title alludes to the process Dodiya has used), pays homage to everything from the Ramayana to Mondrian and Greek vases. He is an apt choice for Bodhi: an upcoming artist concerned with contemporary issues like terrorism, sectarian violence and India's poor. His work is full of images of poverty—a cheap workman's shirt, a stone flour mill symbolizing the tiresome daily grind of the housewife. If Dodiya makes the big time, Judge will have invested well. If not, he has other projects underway: he plans to build his own contemporary art museum in New Delhi.
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