A selection of his columns, including his last column
A passion and a vision in Kasauli
November 12, 2023 (five days before he passed away aged 90)
19.4.76 (Moscow)
Dear Vivan, we had been to Leningrad — fantastic place — remembered you quite a lot. Went to Hermitage and saw Henri Matisse — he did impress me. Also saw Dostovesky’s Museum. In Russia they take hours to serve you lunch or dinner. I am waiting for my lunch — had ordered fried mutton with onions. Would you like to eat too? Love, B…
This little missive, written on the back of a postcard, sent by Bhupen Khakhar to Vivan Sundaram from Moscow, just about catches the spirit of the Kasauli Art Camp, which has just returned to Chandigarh — at the Museum of Fine Arts of the Panjab University — in the form of a fine documented show. For there is in it warmth, a sense of camaraderie, informality, precise information, and the spirit of what they call alltag in German: routine, everyday life. The year in which it was written — 1976 — is the same in which the university became involved with that workshop which represented, for everyone involved, a heady idea and a vision. I was then heading the Department of Art History…
June 13, 2010
At a national forum less than a year ago, I proposed that we, in India, should think of initiating a scheme of designating one city in each region as a Cultural Capital for two years, so that massive funds could be poured into it for creating a high-class infrastructure for cultural activities. But at that time I had — in all honesty — no idea at all that such a scheme, with variations of its own, had been in existence in Europe for the last 25 years. When I travelled to Europe soon afterwards, I discovered this fact to my own embarrassment.
I found out that the historic cities of Linz in Austria and Vilnius in Poland had been declared as European Cultural Capitals for the year 2009... The idea goes back to 1983 when Melina Mercouri, great actress and an icon of her generation, proposed, in her capacity as the Greek Minister of Culture, that each year a city be designated as the European City of Culture, for she believed that culture was not receiving the same attention as politics and economics. The powerful European Union was in the process of being formed... Two years later, the idea received a concrete shape.
January 29, 1999
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... 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... 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 19th century — was especially conservative... 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.
