One of the year’s most awaited shows of Indian art, “Bhupen Khakhar: You Can’t Please All,” opened at Tate Modern, London, on June 1, to a warm reception attended by some of the most important movers and shakers of art from this part of the world.What, however, followed was an explosion that nobody had seen coming. A British art critic ripped apart the show in a widely-read review and the entire Indian art fraternity bristled at the supposed blasphemy. The Indian press has since performed its duty in launching scathing attacks on the art critic, who has been a collateral beneficiary of the brouhaha, earning a name recall that wouldn’t have otherwise been possible.It’s been a week since the launch of the show that will run through November 6, and hopefully the burning cinders have cooled off a bit, helping us refocus on an exhibition that is truly a befitting ode to one of the most unusual modern Indian artists, Bhupen Khakhar (1934-2003). An exhibition of this scale of Bhupen Khakhar’s art, hosted anywhere in India too would have been a five-star event. It has to be celebrated for shining a light on Khakhar’s work and not just for the fact that one of the most important British art institutions, Tate Modern, is running this five-month show; of course, the latter fact too is an acknowledgment of the importance that Khakhar’s art deserves. Just as the Nasreen Mohamedi retrospective that launched the Met Breuer in New York recently is a bigger celebration of the focus on the undervalued artist rather than just the celebration of the fact that she is being shown at such an important venue in New York. Of course, it goes without saying that both the shows are an honor bestowed by global instititutions on artists seminal to modern Indian art, an acknowledgment that is not totally out-of-place considering the world is increasingly becoming truly global with power centres getting diffused right across the globe. We Indians, perhaps, wouldn’t have been so hurt at the criticism of the Bhupen Khakhar show had we not been overtly enthused by the West bestowing an honor on us by doing so in the first place (We will take many, many years to get over the fact that a thing is right only if it has been acknowleged by the West). Middle path, said the Buddha. He suggested equanimity in face of criticism too. Unfortunately for the people of the land where Buddhism was born, criticism is not something that they take kindly to. That’s a dangerous quality, perhaps, which Bhupen Khakhar himself wouldn’t have subscribed to. He would have, perhaps, handled this criticism better because he knew that one can’t please all.In the meanwhile, here are some snapshots of who’s who at the reception held at Tate Modern, that was followed by a seated dinner hosted by the Tate’s South Asian Acquisitions Committee including co-chairs Lekha Poddar and Rajeeb Samdani. Sir Nicholas Serota, Director of Tate Museums and Galleries was present along with the new Tate Modern Director Frances Morris and former Tate Modern Director Chris Dercon, who has curated the exhibition along with Nada Raza. Kiran Nadar, whose museum has supported and lent to the exhibition, was joined by many members of the Indian art fraternity such as Shireen Gandhy, Aparajita Jain, Priyanka Raja, guests such as British artists Howard Hodgkin and Timothy Hyman, who both knew Khakhar well, and Salman Rushdie, who was painted by Khakhar in 1995.Follow@ARTINFOIndia
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