Newest Show in Town
DAG’s new galleries in Mumbai are helping tell the city’s art lovers the definitive story of Indian art
Walking into the sea-facing Taj Mahal Palace and Tower in Mumbai, it is impossible to miss the striking M.F. Husain mural behind the front desk. The hotel is reportedly home to 4,000-odd artworks, 200 of which are considered obvious masterpieces. The collection includes everyone from V.S. Gaitonde and S.H. Raza to Ram Kumar. Having recently opened not one but two outposts here, the DAG gallery has made the building now altogether unmissable. “This isn’t the Taj Art Gallery, though; these two galleries are ‘DAG at the Taj’,” says Kishore Singh, senior vice-president, exhibitions and publications at DAG.
Located on the ground floor of the hotel, DAG 01 “plays on the Raj aesthetic with its Indo-Saracenic exterior and interiors reminiscent of a gentleman’s library, complete with a wooden ceiling, a looped staircase, and shelves where antiquarian books have been displayed,” adds Singh. “The white walls and cosy lighting are perfect. The artworks look like they have been displayed in a club or a salon.”
Further down the corridor, DAG 02 is the larger gallery, which has three sequential exhibition spaces. “The space has arched walkways, windows overlooking Mumbai’s heritage precincts, antique parquet flooring for a leisurely feel, and a minimal classicism. It allows all the artworks to command the stage.”
Curated by Singh, the exhibition Iconic Masterpieces features 50 examples of modern Indian art, spanning a period of over 200 years. It includes works by orientalists—Dutch artist Marius Bauer, Paris-based American painter Edwin Lord Weeks, England’s Frank Brooks, and Stefan Norblin, who fled from Poland ahead of World War
II. The exhibition also includes Nicholas Roerich’s seminal painting ‘Banner of Peace’, M.V. Dhurandhar’s painting of Shiva dancing the twilight tandav, and Ramkinkar Baij’s sculptured portrait of Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore. Singh says he wanted to find “rare, historic and never-seen-before pieces” for this exhibition. There are several exhibits that tick these distinct boxes—F.N. Souza’s ‘Seated Nude on a Blue Armchair’, Husain’s landscape of Udaipur, Ganesh Haloi’s rendering of an Ajanta fresco, and Adi Davierwalla’s ‘Crucifixion’.
Iconic Masterpieces does something crucial: it makes Indian art history accessible, helping us see that the trajectory of our artistic output has always been a thing of delight. ■