Ashish Anand is beaming. The CEO and managing director of DAG, the powerhouse art gallery that debuted two new spaces at Mumbai’s Taj Mahal Palace hotel last weekend, could not have asked for a more opportune guest at his new space. Sachin Tendulkar strolled in on a quiet Thursday morning, as the gallery was putting up its new show, Iconic Masterpieces of Indian Modern Art. The Master Blaster took in the sumptuous paintings, featuring 50 rare and historic works spanning 200 years of art. Billed as the gallery’s most ambitious exhibition till date, it includes many paintings being shown in India for the first time.
“It can’t get more iconic than the Taj as an address,” Anand, 51, says. “People walk in who would otherwise not walk into a gallery because they don’t have the time, or they feel intimidated. We get something like 50 visitors a day, whereas in a gallery you get about three or four. The exposure is phenomenal.”
Inside DAG 1 at the Taj Mahal Palace | Photo Credit: PKS
Anand speaks from experience. DAG, founded in New Delhi in 1993, is housed at The Claridges hotel in the capital. Since the lease on the gallery’s old space in Mumbai expired in 2020, Anand had been looking for prime real estate. He found it at the Taj, where it is now housed in two spaces, referred to as DAG 1 and DAG 2, within the hotel’s ground floor retail area. While separated from each other by other stores, the connection works because the spaces have distinct personalities. The former exudes a rich, old world charm replete with dark wood and a library with rare volumes, and will be used to display high end works, while the latter has a more contemporary feel, with archways, large windows and parquet floors.
50 to begin with
It was after Anand got the Taj spaces that the idea of a show on iconic works of art came to him. “I wanted to do something really special to match the importance of the inaugural spaces,” he says. The opening weekend saw more than 250 people visit on Saturday evening, and on Sunday, author Shobhaa De and her husband Dilip hosted a busy reception, which included Tina Ambani, museum head Tasneem Zakaria Mehta, and a vast array of collectors.
Marius Bauer’s Festival on the Ganges | Photo Credit: Naitik Mehta
Accompanying the show is a lavish two-volume publication, delving into detail on each art work, with contributions by 44 scholars. DAG’s head of publications and exhibitions, Kishore Singh, who spent a year painstakingly curating the show, held a walk through during the opening. He explained that this is the first time that works by western artists — described as orientalists — including Dutch artist Marius Bauer, Paris-based American painter Edwin Lord Weeks, England’s Frank Brooks, and Poland’s Stefan Norblin, were being displayed. The oldest work is an expansive Company painting from 1805 by an anonymous artist of a riverside view of Agra Fort. Singh pointed out its hybrid style, a hallmark of Indian miniaturists commissioned by the East India Company. The work, valued at $1 million, is sold. Singh also highlighted The Poet, a 1938 cement sculpture by Ramkinkar Baij, considered the first modern Indian sculpture, of Rabindranath Tagore’s head, FN Souza’s Seated Nude on a Blue Armchair, MF Husain’s rare landscape of Udaipur, and The Coquette, a beautiful painting attributed to the studio of Raja Ravi Varma.
The most poignant work in the show (not on display in Mumbai, but included in the book) is Nicholas Roerich’s Banner of Peace, possibly the most important painting by the Russian artist, created in 1931 after he moved to India. Roerich, one of India’s nine national artists, had seen many cultural institutions destroyed during World War 1, and wanted to promote peace through culture. “Given what’s happening in the world today, this work is so relevant,” Anand says.
Inside DAG 2 | Photo Credit: PKS
The accidental ‘art man’
Anand stumbled upon art by default. His mother, who enjoyed art, had started the Delhi Art Gallery in 1993. Anand, who was in the ready-made garments business with his brothers, took over from her in 1996. Since he didn’t know much about art, he began travelling across India, spending weeks at a time in Benares, Lucknow, Bikaner, and Kolkata. He went to museums and met artists. “It took me a few years to learn,” he says. “I trained my eye, understood the market, and then systematically started buying art.”
He is clearly passionate, looking at art for up to 15 to 16 hours a day, seven days a week, all year round. “I haven’t taken a vacation in seven years,” he says with a rueful laugh. “I literally have no life!” He gets up to 1,000 phone messages a day, but does not use a computer. And, while he is passionate about art, he is dispassionate about parting with works. “No matter how special I feel about a work, I am a seller,” he explains. “When I sell, the money I make goes back into buying more.” Anand says that DAG has the largest collection of pre-modern and modern Indian art, starting from the 18th century onwards, including antiquarian photography.
FN Souza’s Seated Nude on a Blue Armchair
Thinking big yet affordable
Since those early days, Anand has grown DAG into a multi-city gallery, with spaces in New Delhi, Mumbai and New York. With a 160-member team, it runs museums (including at the Red Fort called Drishayakala), has a prolific publications division, and does public outreach. One aspect he is proud of developing is DAG’s focus on less represented and less recognised — yet important — Indian artists such as Chittaprosad Bhattacharya, Rabin Mondal and Laxman Pai.
The pandemic, which brought digital to the fore, has resulted in DAG launching a comprehensive web platform next month. It will contain information for scholars and students, have film and video, function as a database of 200 artists represented by the gallery, and include thousands of works for sale. Anand says that because selling large, expensive works was challenging in the last two years, as they couldn’t show the works physically, the gallery has also pivoted to lower priced works to reach a wider audience. Today, DAG sells art priced from ₹1 lakh upwards, and this will continue.
MF Husain’s landscape of Udaipur
Going forward, Anand has plans to open a space in Dubai, is exploring venues for institutional shows in Mumbai and Kolkata, and is developing an exhibition on Tipu Sultan. He also wants to put renewed focus on the New York gallery, which he opened in 2015, but feels has not received the attention it deserves. He also has plans to debut an online auction house focussing on works priced at under $10,000. Most of all, he wants to bring art to more people. “95% of the audience is between Delhi and Mumbai; what about the rest of India?” he asks. “This is a big country and more people need to appreciate art. We are trying to create that understanding.”
