Kiran Nadar
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A profile
India Today, November 4, 2015
Gayatri Jayaraman
Ace collector Kiran Nadar has set her eyes on F.N. Souza, and a plot of land for her third, and most expansive, museum yet.
You can be sure she's playing for the Grand Slam. So though Kiran Nadar may have just crashed out in the quarter-finals of the world bridge championships in Chennai this October, make no mistake, picking tricks is all in a day's play for her. If she broke the record for F.N. Souza's 'Birth', picking it up for $3.5 million (approximately Rs 22.75 crore) this summer, buying it from Tina Ambani at Christie's auction in New York, it was much more than a whimsical exchange of hands between industrialists' wives. It adds to her 40-plus Souzas that will go up in a retrospective to be hosted a year and a half from now at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) in Delhi. The work, as John Elliott pointed out in The Independent earlier this year, complements 'Man & Woman Grinding Their Teeth', already in her possession, along with the quirky 'Miss Fanny Brown', the rare burst of joy in his 'Flowers' and the 1964 sketch 'Mahatma Gandhi'. In her range of 40-50 S.H. Razas, the early ones excite Nadar more. "You start to look at your collection in a broader framework. So, you look at Raza as a whole, as a time scale of an artist. Then you look at the gaps," she says. This is how Nadar views the works in her collection; as cards in a suit, filling the gaps in the larger timeline of an artist as she collects, strategically and pointedly, to tell his story. It's not a science, it is intuitive, and sometimes you spot a work and it's like finding a missing piece of a puzzle. She has just met Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, who has revoked the KNMA's sales tax relief "in the interest of the public", to ask about the possibility of centrally located land that she is more than willing to pay full price for, to set up her next venture-a third standalone museum to house not just her permanent collection but visiting collections and galleries-that will benefit the public. For someone who has candidly claimed she remains untutored in art, beginning her collection as a personal enterprise, and extending it into a permanent collection at the museum, it has been a focus that has not come lightly. "I have no formal education in art. There was a feeling of inadequacy; that I should know more so I would read and try to keep abreast of things. That was a self-learning process I had to put myself through to acquire the vocabulary and community of art." If at first she bought with sentiment, a fondness for M.F. Husain, and Manjeet Bawa's imagery, all the Progressives, several of whom she knew personally, she also quickly learned to set sentiment aside for value, period and provenance. "I made mistakes. I bid too high for works worth less. I bought works that were bubbles. I misjudged contemporary and burnt my fingers," she admits. From non-native speaker, Nadar, 64, philanthropist, collector and investor, is today the astute keeper of the dictionary, as it were. The grande dame of the Indian art scene swooped in to save the Kochi-Muziris Biennale last year after the Kerala government, its primary patron, was unable to extend full support. She pitched in with the now ongoing Rs 83-lakh endowment from the CSR budget of husband Shiv Nadar's HCL to support students. "India has many billionaires but few who carry a sense of responsibility," says Bose Krishnamachari, founder and curator of the biennale. Critic and curator Girish Shahane, who founded the now defunct Skoda Prize whose jury Nadar once chaired, says she almost solely moves the Indian art market. Agrees New York gallerist Deepak Talwar, "Kiran is a unique force who has single-handedly revitalised the Indian art ecosystem. Not just from her pocket but with her vision and passion for art as well." Shireen Gandhy, of Mumbai's Chemould Prescott Road gallery, points out that Nadar performs a lonely function, being literally the only art philanthropist out there.
Such is her influence that long before her retrospective of Nasreen Mohamedi in 2013 sparked worldwide interest in the artist, prices of her work began to rise. Nadar's Mohamedi show is opening the Metropolitan Museum of Art's new Bruer building. Given the very influence of her purchases, and her ready access to funds, Nadar has often been accused of boosting certain artists over others-her favourite M.F. Husain; Bharti Kher, whose bindi-covered elephant, 'The Skin Speaks A Language Not Its Own', was one of her first buys; or Subodh Gupta, whose towering 'Line of Control' adorns the entryway of her museum. But as much as she is an astute collector, she is one of the few unmotivated by profit, given that her motive is not sales but exhibition. Nadar's playground is now expanding. There has been a certain drive towards Indian artists globally, the V.S. Gaitonde show at the Guggenheim museum in New York that then travelled to Venice; the forthcoming Bhupen Khakhar exhibition at Tate Modern, London. "We have a lot to offer and Indian art is still undervalued compared to Western or even Chinese art," she says. It's a concerted push and sometimes falls short of target. Her retrospective of Rameshwar Broota, for instance, didn't make it overseas. Calendars get full and the West isn't always biting. But Nadar is wilful. She's in it for a long haul although she admits, "It is very lonely. People in the art space are in fact pulling out of it." It is vital, Nadar says, to expand the base of collectors, and the education of art in India. "We have a dozen to 25 serious collectors. We need to expand that base and get more people to understand that art is really an asset class like property or shares and stocks."
Right now, she notes an urgency to infuse some life into the contemporary art market-which never recovered post the Lehman Brothers crash-although the core of her collection is Modern. "In Moderns, the benchmarks are well laid down. Investing $250,000 will get you that money back. In contemporary, those benchmarks are not set," she says. Re-injecting that market is an investment not just of time and energy, and knowledge, but of trust. And she's happy to be the first one to place that bet down on the table.
