LETTING THE ART IN

The recently concluded India Art Fair in Delhi brought down some walls that separate cultural insiders from those on the outside

- Trisha Gupta

After an hour in the brightly-lit exhibition area of the India Art Fair last Saturday, I escaped to the comfortingly dim auditorium and found a perch at the very back, near the photographers. An elegant older woman in white was speaking to a chatty man who seemed to know her well. It was Kiran Nadar, I soon realised: philanthropist and founder of the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art. The interviewer was Dinesh Vazirani of the Mumbai-based auction house SaffronArt, whose first art auction of 2022 had generated record sales of Rs 104.1 crore in April.

On stage, Vazirani began a rapidfire round. “Your favourite painting in the world?” he asked, adding: “Shall I tell you?” Nadar indulged him. It was Gustav Klimt’s ‘Woman in Gold’. Stolen by the Nazis in the 1940s and won back by the Jewish Bauer family only in 2006, Nadar told the audience that Adele Bloch-Bauer’s portrait always makes her cry. They must make time to visit the Frick Collection to see it, she added, “when next in New York”.

It so happens that ‘Woman in Gold’ hangs not at the Frick, but at another of New York’s smaller art museums, the Neue Galerie. But that doesn’t change Nadar’s feeling for the painting, which she successfully transmitted to her listeners—even if they didn’t often go to New York.