Way back in 1952, when the Tata Group launched the incredible line of cosmetics named Lakmé meant for dusky Indian beauties, few of us were aware that the beauty products borrowed their named from Léo Delibes’s three-act opera of the same title, which was the French version of the name of the Hindu goddess of wealth, Lakshmi.
In Delibes’s opera, she was the daughter of the temple priest and, of course, it was India as seen through the eyes of a Frenchman. Not really India the country we struggle to survive in. The brilliant brand name was the brainwave of Simone Tata, the Swiss-born businesswoman who married into the Tata family. Delibes wrote the score in 1881-82, when exotic Inde and the Orient in general were all the rage in France.
The Paris-based artist, Olaf Van Cleef, who first visited India in 1964 with his grandmother Magda when he was a teenager, and Kolkata in December 1989 when Taj Bengal hotel had just opened, held an exhibition of his paintings at Taj Bengal Kolkata, November 3 to 5.
As an artist, he was appropriating Indian calendar art and giving it a very personal touch that is certainly outré . Rarely have Hindu deities been given such treatment.
Chiffon colours
Ganesha is traditional enough with his elephant head, overhanging belly and his four arms in gestures of benediction, as in countless calendars. But Van Cleef delineates his image with the finest nib of a pen and paints the deity with soft pastels instead of the familiar loud colours, and installs him in a flowery bower that is also part-aviary, with flamingos, peacocks, parrots, cockatoos, hornbills and song birds squawking and squeaking as they wing around. Butterflies flutter around like colourful confetti.
To top it all, he pastes snippets of gold chocolate paper on the painted surface of the paper and multi-coloured Swarovski crystals of all sizes as well so that the paintings begin to resemble Cartier’s famous India-inspired Tutti-Frutti bracelet made of rubies, sapphires and emeralds carved into leaves and fluted beads.
Rama and Sita, Krishna, Murugan and the three-headed Airavata of Thailand are all there but in soft colours one associates with chiffon heavily embroidered with gold threads and beads fashioned out of gems.
It is unmistakably Indian, but with a subtle French touch. The viewer feels the frisson of recognition, and along with it surprise at how Van Cleef has twisted tradition. It is a flamboyant gesture.
But Van Cleef is following in the footsteps of his predecessors and contemporaries from Europe who pinched the mystique of India and bent it their way. Porcelain Indian gods and goddesses with Caucasian visages were once worshipped in many an Indian home. These used to be imported from Belgium and Germany. Lladró of Valencia in Spain still makes them.
Incredible India
The bright colours, the mammoth elephant house, perch of the courtesan Satine, and the blue Vishnu in Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge were all confections with their origins in “incredible” India. It must be added in all fairness that unlike these money-spinning ventures, Van Cleef ploughs the sales proceeds of his
exhibitions into his Puducherry gallery meant for artists who cannot afford their own shows.
His first visit to India with his grandmother made a strong impression on his young mind. Speaking in his Gallic-tinged English, the ebullient man in black tees and jeans, flaunting a belt with a huge buckle in the shape of a silver lizard to show off his recently-acquired gym-honed frame, Van Cleef says they stayed at Taj Mahal Mumbai in the Bella Vista suite facing the Gateway of India and the sea.
His grandmother insisted on displaying a huge bird cage on the terrace and they bought two large, colourful and noisy parrots from Crawford Market for it. This was the first time Van Cleef experienced the colour and chaos of India. Never mind what Edward Said would say, but a man who has sold rocks for Cartier for 33 years can’t help being the way he is.
His destiny is in his name itself. Let us hear this Cahn/ Duke number of the early 1960s: “For good little girls go to heaven/ And smart little girls go to Van Cleef & Arpels, to Tiffany’s and to Cartier.”
Besides being Cartier’s counsellor in high jewellery, he is related to Van Cleef & Arpels, whose pieces were worn by fashion icons such as Elizabeth Taylor, the Duchess of Windsor and Grace Kelly. The trinket shop also designed the crown of Farah Pahlavi of Iran for her coronation ceremony in 1967. It is another matter that the Shah of Iran was dethroned not many years later as an elderly priest swept to victory.
Light touch
Before the Taj Bengal show, Van Cleef held a three-day exhibition from October 26 of these paintings at the Institute De Chandernagore in the former French colony — now a grubby small town — of the same name to coincide with the famous Jagaddhatri Puja carnival which draws crowds from far and near every year.
Marketing genius that Van Cleef is — he was hired in 1982 to decorate the windows of the Cartier boutique in Nice, and soon climbed the corporate ladder and was brought to the Paris shop, which he calls the “temple of high jewellery” — he had realised that his show would be a crowd-puller. Of course, no question of sales here.
At Chandernagore, his exhibition, which drew droves of puja tourists, was inseparable from the other installations sparkling with lights where giant images of the goddess sat calmly on a lion. Van Cleef is equally at home in the palaces of Indian princes and the mansions of industrialists in Kolkata.
He came for the Scindia wedding at Gwalior in 1994, “the most important jewellery experience” when he says he was “was devastated. I had never seen (anything) so beautiful” — meaning the jewellery of the Baroda and Scindia families. There, he realised that the relatively small Cartier jewellery would get overwhelmed by the gorgeous saris. India’s needs were different.
If one forgets the dazzle of gems, perhaps Van Cleef derives the greatest aesthetic pleasure from painting those black-and-white works that, in contrast, have the starkness of monochrome photographs. Complex of design, these have a striking resemblance to the circuits of computers with their maze of interconnecting lines. But these Olaf Van Cleef rarely displays. Or discreetly, when he does. They may have no takers.
The writer is particularly fond of Old Buildings. His latest book, Calcutta: 1940-1970 In the Photographs of Jayant Patel , will be out soon.
