A home for Jehangir's collection

Saloni Doshi | April 23, 2011

The magnificent collection of Jehangir Nicholson finally finds a home.

ONE FOR THE ALBUM: Nicholson, who liked to introduce himself as RK Laxman's Common Man, with his wife Dina. It was after her death in 1967 that he took to collecting contemporary Indian art seriously.

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.

DINING OFF ART: Artworks lined Nicholson's dining room at his Worli bungalow, Westmore.

The Jehangir Nicholson Collection tells the story of contemporary Indian art. What was perhaps most important to the pint-sized collector was to collect works from different phases of an artist's life so that he had a record of the artist's progress and passage. He wasn't happy just to have one token work from every important artist. The works of Raza and Laxman Shreshtha's shifting phases, for instance, are dramatically evident in the collection, as Nicholson bought them steadily from the forties onwards. As art critic Ranjit Hoskote says, "These paintings demarcate a rich universe of concern, revolving as they do around the relationship between an ironic human consciousness and a vast cosmos that speaks to it in polyphonic voices and signs ablaze with mystery."

Jehangir Nicholson or Jangoo Bhai, as he was fondly called by his close friends (1915-2001 ), was born into a wealthy Parsi family that had established itself in the raw cotton trade. He grew up to take charge as director of the family's cotton selection and purchasing agency, Bruel and Co. However, Nicholson himself was a trained chartered accountant, and among his many social roles was Sheriff of Bombay, a post that he held for one year, and advisory board member to the National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA). Tragedy struck in 1967 when his beloved wife Dina passed away. They had no children.

It was grief that made Nicholson embark on his voyage as a collector of contemporary Indian art. Devastated by his wife's death, he began to fill the vacuum in his life with things of beauty. In the '60s, art was not fashionable, nor was it pursued as a hot investment. Paintings and sculptures of local artists were not thought to be worth more than a few hundred rupees. 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."

More: http://www.timescrest.com/culture/a-home-for-jehangirs-collection-5264