The Business Standard previews a new show in Delhi of the Progressives, India’s leading Modern Masters, and the collector who amassed an unequaled trove:
On January 19, Delhi Art Gallery will open its revamped and much augmented space at its original Hauz Khas address in Delhi with ‘Continuum’, a landmark show with over 250 works by the six artists who founded the seminal Progressive Artists Group — Souza, Husain, Raza, Bakre, Ara and Gade. This will be the first time in more than six decades that the “Progressives” will be showing together.
For Ashish Anand, the gallery’s 40-year-old director, this show, the handsome and well-researched books that accompany it, and the new facilities that DAG will offer — a library, lounge, sculpture court — are the culmination of a vision that he’s been working towards for the past 10 years or so. Mostly, it involved buying “truckloads” of art from all over the country. […]
Anand has the largest collection of Indian art — 27,000 works. (In contrast, NGMA has only 17,000 works.) Not just that, he has personal photographs, letters, press clippings, art books and journals, and catalogues. His ambition now — to build an “institution that will be the most comprehensive anywhere in the world for Indian and modern art of the last 100 years”
Big Picture (Business Standard)
