The National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), premier art gallery of India, seems helpless or out of ideas on how to acquire and preserve works of modern art from 1850s onwards.
Recently, a rare set of 12 paintings by the country’s national poet and first Nobel laureate, Rabindra Nath Tagore, went under the auction hammer at Sotheby’s in London and achieved record prices too.
From in.news.yahoo.com:
Despite the nation’s collective shock of ‘how could it be allowed’, the NGMA sat through the proceedings. What many missed was the fact that the gallery, whose first stated objective as expounded in its official website is ‘to acquire and preserve works of modern art from 1850s onwards’, apparently didn’t even have a whiff of the auction till it was officially made public by Sotheby’s last month. Had it known about it, wouldn’t it have worked towards doing something about it? Or would it have really?
NGMA is, perhaps, the only gallery in the world that sits still while the country’s immense art treasure, lying scattered in India and abroad, changes hands. Instead of standing up and accepting that the country doesn’t have an acquisitions policy and something needs to be done about it, all that Rajeev Lochan, the NGMA director, tells us is, ”Please keep me out of it.” Ditto for culture secretary Jawhar Sircar, whose ministry governs the NGMA, who conveyed a message through his secretary, stating: ”There is nothing that he can say about the subject as of now.”
Siddharth Tagore of New Delhi’s Art Konsult gallery, also the great grandson of Rabindranath Tagore, is of the view that NGMA needs to get its act together on smaller fronts.
Posted in 
Tags: 
it was very interesting to read.
I want to quote your post in my blog. It can?
And you et an account on Twitter?