When art unifies people and business
By Anja Ludwig

BANK business and art do not go together, one might think. One being entirely down to earth, the other a matter of imagination, very much inspired by emotions. Walking into Deutsche Bank in Chandigarh proves this assumption to be a prejudice. No matter on which floor the visitor goes, he will, after some time, wonder if his bank is currently putting on an art exhibition.

Only those customers who have long been going to this bank will know that what could be called an “art exhibition” is permanent in this building and part of the concept of the bank all over the world.

While the accountants are meeting their customers, people queuing up to be served, employees working “backstage”, art is always around, adding a kind of playfulness to the bank atmosphere. The visitor does not get the impression that the focus is being taken away from the (bank) business, but that it is enriched in the sense that a different kind of impulse is included in the work carried out.

Deutsche Bank is the largest corporate collector of contemporary art in Germany. Believing that banking is primarily a matter of well-functioning communication, Dr Herbert Zapp, member of the bank Board, developed an art concept for the bank back in the 1970s. The idea behind it is that art is a universal means of communication and can improve the working atmosphere in a bank, being sort of a unifying element between people and business.

Senior museum directors and other art professionals take care of the German-speaking market, supervising the collection of works of art from Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Abroad, the branches of the bank exhibit German art together with contemporary art from the host country. That way, various kinds of combinations of art are established everywhere, underlining the international character of the fusion that is taking place businesswise.

The cultural relationship of India and Germany dates back centuries, and close ties of the bank with India have existed for almost 100 years. The art programme at the bank in India was started in 1993, trying to gather the Indian part of the collection for the branch in Bombay.

At the bank branch in Chandigarh, the Indian works include drawings and sculptures by Anita Dube, Anjum Singh, Arpana Caur, Navjot Altaf, Ram Kumar and Krishan Khanna, as well as black and white photographs by Diwan Manna. The German art comprises a series of nine watercolours by Elsbeth Arlt entitled “Only One Glass of Wine”, which occupy the long wall in the main conference room on the first floor. There are charcoals on transparent paper by Miriam Cahn, colourful scissorcuts by Imi Knoebel, linocuts by Zazie Vincon and mixed media works by Gunter Nosch. Labels next to the works indicate the artist’s name and year of birth, including title of work and medium.

The oil on canvas painting by Krishan Khanna, entitled “Bandwallas” (1992), is one of the first drawings the visitor will notice when he walks into the bank. It invites the customer to have a closer look while waiting in front of the counters. This piece of art hides more than it reveals and it is the observer’s task to take some time and discover that the musician in the foreground is not alone in this picture. The contours of his colleagues and their instruments are blurred and, therefore, hardly recognisable. If the queue one is waiting in is long enough, he might be able to make out the whole band.

On the first floor, a huge sculpture, “A Blue Night’s Tiger Greed”, done by another Indian artist, Anita Dube, in 1993, fills the room. It is made of painted wood and fibreglass and being blue all over it adds some colour to the otherwise traditional-looking bureau floor.

Imi (Wolfgang) Knoe-bel, born in Germany in 1940, studied art under the famous Joseph Beuys in Duesseldorf. His scissorcuts (1984), based on a “disordered order”, including both colour and structure, are exhibited in a series of three pictures. The style Knoebel pursues in his work, is probably the one the observer would call the most abstract and modern one, which makes him stand out from his colleagues. Thus, the collection offers an opportunity to contrast different concepts of art reflected in the miscellaneous works displayed for the public.

Some Indian banks such as Indus Bank and the Bank of India, have already followed the example of this bank and started their own art galleries. Deutsche Bank thus seems to be a trend-setter in this kind of venture.

Eagerly-awaited craft mela
By Yoginder Gupta

COME February and connoisseurs of crafts start converging at Surajkund, near Delhi, in Haryana. For it is the time for the annual Surajkund Crafts Mela, which is organised every year from February 1 to 15 by the Union Tourism Ministry in collaboration with Haryana Tourism and Development Commissioners of Handlooms and Handicrafts.

Over the years the mela, which was organised first in 1987, has become an eagerly-awaited event. For the first two years the mela was without any theme, but from 1989 every year a state is adopted as the theme state. This year the fifth largest state of the country, Andhra Pradesh, will be the theme state of the mela.

A replica of the famous Charminar of Hyderabad has been constructed to form the master motif of the mela. The Charminar replica is in continuation of the tradition of constructing replicas of a monument of the theme state every year. If the Shekhawati Gate and a haveli with wall murals represented Rajasthan in 1989, it was the delicately decorated Vishnupur Gate to depict West Bengal in 1990. Similarly Kottayambalam Gate (1991), Danteshawri Devi Gate (1992), Mukteshwar Gate (1993), Hoysala Gate (1994), Ram Bagh Palace Gate (1995), Maheswar Devta Temple Gate (1996) and the Haveli Street (1997) take the visitors to the mela to the states they represent, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Karnataka, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh and Gujarat, respectively.

The Rang Ghar mini pavilion constructed in 1998 revives the images of “seven sisters” of the North-East.

According to the managing director of the Haryana Tourism Corporation, Ms Keshni Anand Arora, 24 weavers from the theme state of Andhra Pradesh will participate in the mela to display textiles like Telia rumal, Kalamkari painting, cotton scarf with Ikat weave, brocade weaving, cotton durrie, tie-dye sarees, Mangalgiri zari dress material, Approva silk, cultural cotton dress, Jamdari wedding cotton spread, Ikat saree, Gallapally saree, Peddarchi gadi saree, Air buta saree and Uppadha Jamdani wall hangings.

In addition, the craftspersons from Andhra Pradesh will bring Bidriware, Nirmal toys, brassware, jute crafts, Hyderabadi pearls and jewellery, Karchobi zari work, miniature paintings, artistic leatherware, bronze casting, wood carving and leather puppets for the lovers of handicrafts.

Ms Arora says the mela authorities have invited 120 weavers and 189 craftspersons this year. As many as 72 weavers are national or state awardees and 18 of them women. Similarly, 45 craftspersons are national awardees and 32 state awardees.

Besides the crafts, there will be a food festival also, with introduction of cuisine from Andhra Pradesh. The mela will be held in rural ambience, with huts, a chaupal and a meandering waterway and mini bridges over it.

by B.N. Goswamy
Old debates about photography

OVER the years, one has stopped being surprised by the level of prices which works of art, especially in the fiercely competitive, and curiously whimsical, market in the West fetch. But even I was not prepared for the price someone mentioned to me recently of a photograph — not a painting, not some classical sculpture, but a photograph —, according to an estimate given in a catalogue of a New York-based auction house. The work was by the celebrated 20th century Hungarian painter, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, who was also a visionary photographer. And the price? Between 90,000 and 120,000 American dollars, which translates into something between Rs 35 lakh and Rs 45 lakh. This passes my comprehension. Completely.

Obviously —and one says this with some relief — this is not what every photograph fetches. But the art has come a long, long way from those early days when photography was first introduced to the world. In fact, it had to struggle long and hard even to gain recognition as an art form.

The society in which it appeared — France of the 1930s of the 19th century — was especially conservative, with its Academy and Salon structures wielding such power in the world of art. Everyone was excited, for the significance of the new development was apparent, but everyone was also a little nervous, a little unsure as to where this new-fangled invention was going to lead the world.

Divisions appeared rather quickly. There were those among the artists who saw it as a tool, invaluable because of the incredibly accurate ‘sketches’ from nature it could supply them with; but there were also others — those with the literal reproduction of the visible world as their chief aim — who perceived it as a threat, for it could render them completely obsolete, even redundant.

The debate that developed, and the fissure that appeared in the art world, are fascinating to follow. The highly respected Romantic painter, Delacroix, signed himself up as a charter member of the first Photographic Society to be founded in France in 1851, commending the use of the new invention to the favour of fellow artists. Daguerrotypes — this as one knows is how early photographs were designated, after the name of the inventor, Louis Daguerre — were interpretations of nature, he wrote: they revealed her secrets. There was a note of caution in his words, but also great enthusiasm: “If a man of genius uses the Daguerrotype as it should be used, he will elevate (his art) to a height hitherto unknown.”

But others were less convinced, and very uneasy. When photographers — who had begun to organise themselves rapidly and were refusing to be treated simply as merely ‘factotums to art’ — succeeded in getting a small section of the French Salon of 1859 devoted to photography, the step aroused much ire.

Seeing it as ‘an impertinence’ the greatly influential Baudelaire, a literary icon of his times, railed against these developments. Photography, he said, was “the mortal enemy of art”. His attack was directed as much against the French Academy, as against the public, which looks “only for truth” in Art.

There was anger in his words, and irony. “Since photography gives us every guarantee of exactitude that we could wish, then photography and Art are the same thing..... If photography is allowed to stand in for Art in some of its functions it will soon supplant or corrupt it completely.” Like a pontiff, he held forth: “Photography must return to its real task, which is to be the servant of the sciences, and of the Arts, but a very humble servant.”

Some people took the matter to court. When, after long arguments, the French court announced its decision in which photography was declared to be an Art, the issue was by no means settled. At least in the minds of many artists.

There were angry protests, and the judgement met with a hostile response, a large number of artists, including that brilliant Classicist, Ingres, sending up a petition. Never, they stated, could photography “be compared with those works which are the fruits of intelligence and a study of Art.”

To many, doomsday appeared to be close. “I greatly fear”, wrote Flandrin in 1863, “that photography has dealt a death blow to Art.” In all these utterances, one does not fail to notice of course that Art is always spelt with a capital “A”, while photography has to remain content with a small, lower-case “P”.

But there was no stopping photography. The story of French painting in the 19th century is well known, and the manner in which photography influenced the work of so many of the greatest artists of that century — Courbet, Monet, Degas, among them — is well documented. The “humble servant” of Baudelaire’s description was to rise many notches upwards as the century progressed and melted into the next one, in which it emerged triumphant: a noble and lively art in its own right.

According to calculations based on the sale of materials, the journal “Photography News” estimated in the year 1863 — this is less than a quarter of a century after the camera was invented — that 105 million photographs were produced in the previous year in Great Britain alone. This I find to be a stunning statistic.

Other cameras

The fact may be little known to many, but artists in Europe knew another device, well before the invention of the “photographic camera”, which they put to their own use. Called the camera obscura — literally, the “dark chamber” — this was an apparatus “which projects the image of an object or scene on to a sheet of paper or ground glass so that the outlines can be traced”. The device has a long history, and many names of scientists and artists — those of Roger Bacon, Leonardo da Vinci, Vasari, Johann Kepler, among them — come up whenever an understanding of the device is spoken of. Topographical paintings and drawings were widely made with its assistance in the 18th century, and one reads about an apparatus, “somewhat like a sedan chair”, in which the artist could sit and draw, actuating at the same time bellows with his feet to improve the ventilation!