Art lovers from around the world can now browse through three well-curated exhibitions of the iconic Victoria Memorial, which went live on the Google Art & Culture Project on Thursday, also the International Museum Day
The three separate exhibitions thus featured are ‘Magnificent Heritage of India as seen by the Daniells’, ‘The Art of Abanindranath Tagore’ and ‘Gaganendranath Tagore: Painter and Personality’, which contain 241 paintings with related details.
“What we are putting up virtually are curated exhibitions that will appear like a catalogue to a viewer, not only paintings but also lot of text. It is not possible for us to hold these exhibitions at one time virtually for lack of space. We are overcoming that lack of space by going virtual,” secretary and curator of Victoria Memorial Hall (VMH) Jayanta Sengupta told The Hindu .
While the VMH collections include about 30,000 artifacts, its galleries can display only 10% of them for paucity of space, a problem common to most museums.
Google Arts & Culture provides an online platform via which the public can access high-resolution images of artworks housed in the world’s leading museums.
The paintings of landscapes and monuments by Thomas Daniells and his nephew William Daniells in the second half of the 18th century are among the most outstanding works of Western art in VMH’s collections, whereas Abanindranath Tagore and Gaganendranath Tagore represent the finest from the Bengal School.
While the Daniells exhibition has been curated in-house, those on Abanindranath Tagore and Gaganendranath Tagore have been curated by noted art historian Ratan Parimoo.
Abanindranath’s ‘Bharatmata’ (1905), the first purely Indian idea of the spirit of motherland, is one of the most famous paintings featured by the project.
