To collect, and then to share

“To appreciate Indian paintings and manuscripts, one must love their elemental qualities — blazing colour, burnished gold leaf, darkly inked lines — as well as learn the profound philosophy and mythology that is their well-spring. … Suffused with the powerful imagery of the myths of the past, Indian painting expresses a new way of seeking the divine through bhakti, or personal devotion.”

— Thomas P. Campbell,

“ … in some ways, it is hard for most secular Westerners to fully partake of the world that these paintings explore, which in India is still infused with the daily rhythms of the Hindu gods, their festivals, and the personal quest for salvation. New York is a religiously diverse, mainly secular society.… It is my hope that here, eight thousand miles away, these Indian paintings will nevertheless still speak clearly to us with an easily intuited joy that will enliven our souls and beckon us to enter into their universe.”

— Steven M. Kossak, collector, author and curator

The fine exhibition of Indian paintings — Rajput paintings, from courts in the Pahari region and Rajasthan, to be more specific — at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York had made news even before it went up earlier this year, it seems. As many as a hundred paintings were going to be on display, and most of these were going to be pledged as a gift to the museum by the wealthy Kossak family. ‘Divine Pleasures’ was the word: exactly the title of the show. There was excitement among scholars, art critics, museum experts, for the gift/show was from the Kronos Collection, widely known for its singular standards of taste.

Some masterworks from the collection had been published earlier, more than once in fact; some had even been exhibited before. And yet, there was a sense of anticipation. There, for instance, was going to be that irresistible, utterly seductive, leaf from the Gita Govinda series — in the hand of a member of the celebrated Seu-Manaku-Nainsukh family of painters from Guler in the hills, ca. 1775 — in which, having been sent off homewards from the fields by Nanda, Krishna and Radha tarry a while in the middle of a forest, and their secret passions begin to unfold. The work is magical. In it, one sees the dazzlingly lit figures of the two lovers surrounded by the brooding mystery of the falling night; tenderly Krishna caresses his beloved and, as she gazes equally tenderly into his eyes, time seems to come to a stop; the rest of the world ceases to exist. There is quietude, and their gently rising passion is caught with amazing discreetness. The stillness of the night, as the painter captures it, is strangely affecting: the trees all round them rise tall and dark, the river in the background falls silent one senses, the fronds of the towering palm trees stay motionless. And our eyes almost refuse to move away from the lovers’ forms, exquisitely drawn, standing as if in a masque.

At the same time, there were distinguished works from Rajasthan: centres of painting in Bikaner, Kotah, Udaipur, Kishangarh, and so on. Even a simple painting — simple only as it stood in contrast to the lush Pahari work I have just described — like the portrait of a prince of Uniara, Rao Raja Bishen Singh, made an impact. The prince stands all by himself — no retainers in sight, no fly-whisk bearer — on a grassy patch, in his right hand justa flower, the other holding on to the hilt of a long sword the tip of which rests on the ground. But there is great elegance in the rendering: the youthful head covered by an exquisitely patterned turban, the long semi-transparent, pristine white jama flaring out in watery waves, the feeling of a light forward movement, above all, the small flock of tiny pigeons doing somersaults in the air, as it were.

One can go on and on, for throughout the book that accompanied the Kossak show, there were arresting images, described and sensitively commented upon by Terence McInerny and Navina Haider. But my attention went also to a very absorbing essay at the beginning by Steven Kossak, obviously the man who was the prime mover behind this rich event. “Collecting Pleasures” is how Steven titled his essay, and this is exactly what he speaks of in it. One reads about how he, coming as he did from a Boston family with old money, began collecting at a young age — coins, stamps, butterflies, rocks, at first, and then moving on to lithographs and etchings by old European masters — but became interested in Indian paintings in the late 1970s. However, once he entered this world of ‘blazing colour, burnished gold leaf, and darkly inked lines’, in which ‘abstraction is more dominant than naturalism’, there was, it seems, no coming out for him. There were dealers and collectors and curators all around, especially in New York, and, having once started, he kept not only collecting but also honing his knowledge and expanding his horizons, even enrolling at a university to do graduate work in art history. Books and exhibitions followed; as collector and connoisseur he moved on to taking up formal positions in the Met, and becoming curator of Indian painting some 10 years back. The essay that I speak of, however, is not biographical; he talks in it, against the sustained background of art history, of the trials and excitements that come the way of the collector: the difficulty of making choices and of filling up gaps, the misses and the near misses, the occasional error, the lurking sense of competition, the exultation following a great acquisition, and so on. There is, in his account, even a detailed mention of the conflict of interest that a collector who is also a curator, must handle... At the Met, though, he was able to find an elegant solution. “Occasionally”, Steven writes, “I would discuss a possible costly acquisition directly with Director Philippe de Montebello, who would decide if the Museum was willing to go after it. Sometimes, I would end up acquiring for my collection something he was unwilling to fund”. But then he adds, quietly, that he would “acquire them with the idea of eventually donating them to the Met”. This is exactly what has happened. The total value today of the promised donation? Between 15 million and 20 million dollars, according to estimates.

“Despite their immediate appeal”, Steven writes, referring to his Rajput paintings, in the concluding section of his essay, “a full appreciation of many of these images requires a multivalent analysis”. That is what this gift and this catalogue will, one hopes as his family does, lead some to undertake.