Golden Jubilee: Spirit Set Free

Kumar Gallery presents Spirit Set Free, a Golden Jubilee show featuring selected works by 54 artists.

October 1, 2005

This, the final of Kumar Gallery's Golden Jubilee expositions, marking the termination of the event, is not only of note intrinsically—consists as it does of salient works by the most compelling artists on the Indian scene during more than half a century, but also because the Gallery has justifiable claims to being the true art pioneer in the capital :terra firma for artists in the once artistic wilderness. Certainly behind this, almost single-handed move has been the vision of Mr. Virendra Kumar. He brought the meaning of being an art gallery to adulthood the focus was not only on the display of art works, but the support of art in the making, and in need of utmost empathy. Here was no dilettantism of purpose but a focused relationship with the whole vital cycle of art gerrnination, it's slow maternal grooming, a close personal relationship with the creators and, finally, the putting up of art work before the viewing public.

This fateful social function is what the Kumar Gallery, with Virendra Kumar at its helm, as his brothers, discharged over half a century. And this has been widely testified to by no few of the eminent and senior most of painters, among them, M.F. Husain. The works of these luminaries now grace the walls of the Gallery in full splendour. In conversation with Virendra Kumar over many years, if not indeed decades, it has come home to me that the marketing of art works has not been hischief concern, natural as it is for an art dealer. No, it is by now transparent that art matters to him as being a thing of the spirit in its higher reaches; that art is the stuff of which life is made; that he regards art as a primal phenomenon which in no conceivable circumstances can be banished from the world. He knows well that artistic representation is a natural and indispensable mode of vital expression; is convinced that mankind will always need the holy and liberating form of play that is called art in order to feel itself as properly human.

Yes, yes, art is indeed one of the prime agencies that civilizes the uncouth, barbaric part of human nature. And such conviction comes across as much by the founder's avowal, as by his painstaking efforts to espouse and nurture above board art works. This same life attitude is, I believe, rather rare at this current moment of tirne in art dealings. And so I will end by saying that Mr. Kumar's commendable catholicity of purpose is worth emulation by all who now ride the art band-wagon. Not only the body, but the spirit of art has got to be jealously guarded, no less.

- Keshav Malik