The Art of Collecting
- By Anupam Poddar, Devi Art Foundation

I have often been asked my motivation for collecting the kind of art I do. Ten years later, and having established a not-for-profit foundation to showcase some of our choices in this period, I must confess that the answers are still hard to come by. However, the benefit of hindsight allows for a collector to contemplate upon some of his/ her choices.

My foray into collecting was predicated on my mother’s extensive collection of folk and tribal art, textiles from all over the country and a large body of works by artists of the Bombay Progressives group, the Bengal School artists and other artists of the time. Buildings have often been the most important catalysts in my life, shaping my choices with regard to the art that I gravitated towards. Moving back to India after completing my education, we shifted into our current residence, a farm house on the outskirts of Delhi. While we were interested in ensuring that art played a significant role in spaces of the house, I wanted to find artworks of more diverse material, something that spoke to me about the times that I was living through, rather than the concerns or ruminations of the artists from the past.

My search led me towards works by artists such as Subodh Gupta, Bharti Kher, Susanta Mandal, A. Balasubramaniam, Mithu Sen, and many others. Having my senses exploded by their very exciting practice and having their works invade my house, I never really realized the extent to which art-collecting had become an obsession with me. Eventually, my mother and I came to understand that given the fact that state patronage to such a practice would be minimal if not entirely absent, it was essential for us to institute a platform for sharing these works with a wider audience. Also, the more we looked around, the more we found that there were hardly any forums in the city or even the country wherein cutting-edge work was shown within the framework of an equally sharp curatorial idea. Hence, the idea of a not-for-profit foundation was born.

The foundation has a rather ambitious agenda and has its own goals. However, I have come to understand that while we work with certain limitations of a private collection while attempting to take a guess at where history will lead us in terms of contemporary Indian art, we can never ignore the fact that the collection is based on the choices and influences and tastes that are quite particular to my mother and me. After an initial period of unease and oscillating between what is the ‘right’ work to collect, I have made peace with the idea that an interesting collection does not shy away from the fact that it speaks of the tastes of one or two individuals, even as it attempts to share it with a larger public.

I have seen my art collecting become a little more than a passion, a madness that characterizes all collecting. A major parameter for me is intuiting if a work will provoke and interest me long after its novelty has worn off, even as the aims of the foundation nudge their way into these considerations. This process has taken a while and the ‘mistakes’ are as liable to happen now as they were a few years ago. However, it is a journey that once embarked upon promises rich dividends on levels much more significant than commerce and social standing.