Get to know Umesh and Sunanda Gaur, champions of modern and contemporary Indian art

The depth and quality of the Umesh and Sunanda Gaur’s collection of Indian art, which has been exhibited around the world, is unquestionable. Their first acquisition was Maqbool Fida Husain’s painting Mother at Christie’s South Asian Modern + Contemporary Art auction in 1995. Since then the couple have become storied patrons of Indian art who have championed the category in North America.

Christie’s New York is proud to present South Asian Modern + Contemporary Art Including Works from the Collection of Umesh and Sunanda Gaur on 20 March, as well as South Asian Modern + Contemporary Art Online on 13–27 March, which features additional selections from their collection. With coveted works from contemporary phenoms such as Nalini Malani and Sudhir Patwardhan and modern masters like K. G. Subramanyan and Francis Newton Souza, it is an occasion not to be missed.

‘The Gaurs are flag bearers for our category,’ says Nishad Avari, Specialist and Head of Indian Art at Christie’s. ‘From presenting these works in nationally touring exhibitions to organising numerous publications for them, they are dedicated to furthering knowledge about Indian art in this region. It would not have happened without them.’

‘When we started, it was not really our mission to build a large collection,’ Umesh Gaur tells Christie's, ‘but within five years we were already planning our first exhibition at the Zimmerli Museum at Rutgers University.’ With upcoming exhibitions at the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the couple has also exhibited their collection at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City, consistently bringing their works to the public eye.

This year marks the centenary of Souza’s birth in 1924, and the sale offers several works by the artist from the Gaur Collection. The top lot of the collection is Souza’s Girl with Two Men, from 1963. It embodies his characteristic figurative style, which in the 1950s and 1960s culminated in his series of ‘black paintings’, for which he is well known.

Often labelled India’s most radical artist, Souza was a founding member of the Progressive Artists’ Group in 1947 — the year India gained independence. Alongside artists such as Sayed Haider Raza and M. F. Husain he sought to usher in a new language of Modern art in India. Combining Indian classical themes and European technological and stylistic advancements, the group formally established artistic modernism in India.

Another highlight of the Gaur collection is Sudhir Patwardhan’s Mother and Child. Patwardhan came to painting after working as a radiologist, and this work depicts a patient of his, evinced by the X-ray in the mother’s hand. ‘For a collection of Patwardhan's work, Mother and Child serves as the starting point of his career,’ says Umesh. ‘For us, it had a special resonance hanging in our home, as Sunanda is also a physician.’

Part of what makes the Gaur collection so impactful is Umesh and Sunanda’s in-depth, scholarly approach, selecting works that together spotlight an artist’s development. In the case of Souza’s Girl with Two Men, the preparatory study is being offered alongside the oil painting, tracing the making of the work from its inception. The Gaurs were ahead of the curve in recognising the importance of these works on paper, of which they collected many.

As Umesh said in an interview last year: ‘[In the 1990s] there was not enough interest in works on paper, which were priced lower than the rest. However, we realized that some very significant works on paper were coming to the auctions, and we ended up buying some important and rare drawings and prints. Before we knew it, we had some of the best works on paper in the United States.’

Amongst these works on paper is K. G. Subramanyan’s Untitled (Best Bakery), made during the later phase of the artist’s career in 2005, as well as Souza’s Untitled (Woman), made just after he was expelled from Sir J. J. School of Art 1945 for his role in the protests against its British director during the Quit India movement.

Souza’s watercolour on paper The Naked Family (Bombay Beggars) presents some of the political themes that entered his art around this time, highlighting the social plight of peasants and the urban poor. Eventually joining the Communist Party in 1947, he became known as a painter for the working class. This painting, akin to Social Realism, is amongst the earliest examples where this theme in his work can be gleaned.

‘The group is shown unclothed [in this work] — possibly the first among such paintings in which he dispensed with the need for apparel altogether. His later paintings would feature nudes as well as landscapes but in circumstances vastly different from this.’ writes Tamara Sears in Paper Trails: Modern Indian Works On Paper From The Gaur Collection, one of the many publications about the collection, which accompanied an exhibition of the same title at the Grinnell College Museum of Art.

Beyond mainstays of modern and contemporary Indian art, the couple has also focused on artists whose markets are just beginning to take shape, such as Nalini Malani. Often exploring feminine experiences and struggles, Malani asserts a sense of empowerment in her work. Appropriating imagery from various genres and time periods, her iconography has been honed over a more than fifty-year career in a variety of media. It is this sensibility that defined her recent retrospectives at the Centre Pompidou and the Irish Museum of Modern Art.

‘Malani’s Love is truly a museum-quality piece,’ says Gaur. ‘It also has quite a rare quality, being a unique painting you can view either horizontally or vertically.’ This adds to the work's elusiveness, while the intimacy of the subjects imbues it with familiarity, and it is precisely this juxtaposition that underpins her oeuvre.

Throughout their collecting journey, Umesh and Sunanda Gaur have been patrons in the purest sense of the word. Since that first work by M. F. Husain, their collection has long struck an expert balance between the past and present, providing a scholarly survey of innovations in Indian modernism while spotlighting the latest names at the forefront of contemporary art in India.

‘Umesh and Sunanda have spent a lot of time and effort getting museums to sit up and take notice of modern and contemporary South Asian Art,’ says Avari. ‘They have become crucial advocates for our genre in North America.’