The idea of a national art gallery to germinate
and bear fruit was first mooted in 1949. It was
nurtured carefully by Prime Minister Jawahar Lal Nehru and Maulana Azad, sensitive bureaucrats like Humayun
Kabir and an active art community.
Vice-president Dr S Radhakrishanan formally
inaugurated the NGMA in the presence of Prime
Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and artists and art
lovers of the city on March 29, 1954. The choice
of Jaipur House, one of the premier edifices of
Lutyens’ Delhi, signified the envisaged high
profile of the institution. Designed by Sir
Arthur Bloomfield, as a residence for the
Maharaja of Jaipur, the butterfly-shaped
building with a central dome was built in 1936.
It was styled after a concept of the Central
Hexagon visualised by Sir Edwin Lutyens. It was
Lutyens, along with Herbert Baker, who
visualised and gave shape to the new capital in
Delhi. Along with buildings designed for other
princely potentates like Bikaner and Hyderabad,
Jaipur House girded the India Gate circle. The
famous architect conceptualised a harmony of
facades giving the buildings a distinctive
character.
NGMA’s inauguration was marked by an exhibition
of sculptures. All the prominent sculptors of
the time like Debi Prasad Roy Chowdhury,
Ramkinkar Baij, Sankho Chaudhuri, Dhanraj Bhagat,
Sarbari Roy Chowdhury and others had
participated. The show spoke of the painstaking
preparations made by NGMA’s first curator Herman
Goetz. A noted German art historian, Goetz had
earlier been responsible for setting up the
Baroda Museum.Since Goetz’s tenure, NGMA has had
a string of distinguished directors.
The Gallery is the premier institution of its
kind in India. It is run and administered as a
subordinate office to the Department of Culture,
Government of India. The NGMA has two branches
one at Mumbai and the other at
Bangaluru shortly. The gallery is a repository
of the cultural ethos of the country and
showcases the changing art forms through the
passage of the last hundred and fifty years
starting from about 1857 in the field of Visual
and Plastic arts. Notwithstanding some gaps and
some trivia, the NGMA collection today is
undeniably the most significant collection of
modern and contemporary art in the country
today. |
