Museum · New Delhi, Delhi
National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi
The national collection of modern Indian art, kept in a former maharaja's house on the India Gate circle. Its holdings across three branches run to about 17,000 works, the earliest from around 1857.
See first
- Amrita Sher-Gil, whose paintings began the state's collection of modern art
- Rabindranath, Abanindranath and Gaganendranath Tagore
- The Santiniketan teachers: Nandalal Bose, Benode Behari Mukherjee, Ramkinkar Baij
- Jamini Roy
- Company, Kalighat and Tanjore paintings, where the story starts
The gallery opened on 29 March 1954 in Jaipur House, a butterfly-shaped building with a central dome, designed by Arthur Blomfield in 1936 as the Delhi residence of the Maharaja of Jaipur. Its first curator was the German art historian Hermann Goetz. The opening show was sculpture: Ramkinkar Baij, Debi Prasad Roy Chowdhury, Sankho Chaudhuri and others.
The collection began with Amrita Sher-Gil. Her father, Umrao Singh, offered 33 of her paintings to the government on one condition: that it also buy the 33 held by her husband, Victor Egan. Nehru agreed, and the state had the start of a modern collection.
What is here now is close to a full account of Indian art since the mid-nineteenth century. Academic realists such as Raja Ravi Varma; the Bengal School; Santiniketan; the four individualists of the 1920s and 30s, Rabindranath and Gaganendranath Tagore, Sher-Gil and Jamini Roy; then the Progressives and after.
The galleries are large, and a single visit rarely covers them. Pick a period and stay with it.
