Tina the collector

For me, it’s a revelation that she’s on the board of the Peabody Essex Museum — can you imagine an Indian museum, or gallery, that would offer Tina Ambani a similar position of responsibility without strings attached? — which is where the iconic F N Souza painting The Birth that she picked up on a whim for a rocking Rs 10.5 crore, is housed on a five-year loan from her. “I suppose I will bring it here, but it’s criminal to pay 15 per cent cess,” she laments, a position also addressed by other bidders at international auctions who cavil at being taxed for bringing back to India works of Indian art.

Tina Ambani, talking so fast she chokes incessantly, does seem drawn to a marriage of art, aesthetics and historicity, having come to that position as a collector and reacting more often from the gut than the intellect of an investor. Her own favourites, Souza apart (and there’s plenty of evidence of that), include M F Husain, S H Raza, Tyeb Mehta and Ramkumar, though in the heart of Ballard Estate’s Reliance Centre, the artists include Sudhir Patwardhan, Anju Dodiya, Jittish Kallat, Jayasri Burman, Navjot and probably heaps of others hung across meeting and conference rooms and executive cabins. It’s a richer display of art in a corporate office than I have seen before in India, yet it is not overpowering.

She claims she became a collector “unconsciously” — perhaps as a result of her outing as the grande dame of the Harmony Art Show, started as a mélange of high and low art (or at least senior and emerging artists — she insists several of the biggies of contemporary art started with her but will not name them). To encourage the artists, she would buy several works herself, thereby laying the foundation for what has become a formidable collection.

This year could consolidate that position further. Thrown open over this weekend, and on till the 14th at Coomaraswamy Hall in Mumbai, the annual Harmony show has been curated by Gayatri Sinha, thereby raising its bar. There are two interesting elements here. Tina Ambani has been drawn to the tradition of the miniature in India, and the previous show (in 2009) rode on that interest. This year, Sinha has taken it further in her new narratives in the art of the miniature. Steering away from anything as gauche as the miniature being used as a symbol of national identity in Pakistan, here the viewer will find himself drawn as much by the content as a reimagining of sizes — ranging from, well, the unusual application of the miniature format (Pooja Iranna, Saravanan Parasuraman) to the overwhelming (Lavanya Mani, T Venkanna), from the well known (Arpita Singh, Nilima Sheikh) to the unknown (Varunika Saraf, Nicola Durvasula), from the thoughtful (Suhasini Kejriwal, Anjum Singh) to the playful (Waswo X Waswo, Dhruvi Acharya) to the predictable (Chintan Upadhyay, N S Harsha), from the unusualness of the bazaar (Chitra Gupta, Orijit Sen) to the bizarre (Ratheesh T, Mithu Sen).

Sinha’s gift to Tina Ambani the collector is this curation whereby she has the pick (though she insists she gets only the leftovers) of what are specially commissioned works, an indulgence only at par with the clippings on art and artists that husband Anil Ambani regularly sends her from his office.

“It spoke to me,” Tina Ambani, usually a conservative spender, shares on why she went wild over Souza’s Birth. That passion, and the evolving curatorial excellence of her Harmony Art Show, could be the stepping stone to Tina Ambani-the-collector going public — something Delhi already has but Mumbai urgently needs.

Kishore Singh is a Delhi-based writer and art critic. These views are personal and do not reflect those of the organisation with which he is associated