(Photo: Public Notice 2, 2007 © Jitish Kallat)

This season Charles Saatchi’s roving eye settles on India. Amassed during the boom in the market a couple of years ago, this portion of his collection is presented to us at a time when the bubble in that market has now burst. Showcasing a multitude of India based artists - and a handful from the U.S., U.K. and Pakistan - the collection varies in quality: it includes a stuffed camel curled into a suitcase, a whirring, skeletal Xerox machine and a robotic army made of bulbs and stop lights. The artists play with various concerns: from uneasy, political dialogues between the past and present, to responses to its status as a rising economic power. The show starts strong, with a haunting rendering of Gandhi’s 1930 speech on the eve of the Salt March to Dandi. Monumental in size, it is comprised of letters sculpted to look like bones. Highlights include Bharti Kher’s imaginative interpretation of a blue sperm whale’s heart, decorated in a plethora of coloured bindis – a motif in her work. T. V. Santhosh’s duet of paintings impresses you with their lurid green and shocking orange: these colour photographic negatives are amped up with violent energy. Chitra Ganesh offers comic strip-style stories of a liberated Indian superwoman – a fresher transformation of the female stereotype than that presented by Pushpamala N. Rashid Rana’s print stitches together minute images of detritus into a surprisingly beautiful aerial view. However, the work of Jitish Kallat seems a favourite of Saatchi, as an entire gallery is devoted to the artist: a mammoth-sized sculpture of a child book-seller dominates the room, giving the street kids of Mumbai a sense of gravity and endurance. The exhibition is vast, flaunting myriad styles: it offers but a taste of work currently being produced in this subcontinent.

–Petra

You might think that these two prints are crafted from the Edo period by a Japanese hand, but in fact, these are oil paintings on canvas executed by the Impressionist master, Van Gogh (1853-90). 

These prints are of course copies of Hiroshige’s Plum Garden at Kameido and Sudden Shower over Ohasi Bridge. 

Van Gogh was a true Japanophile. He was an avid collector of Japanese prints and later in life became a dealer of these prints. So enamoured was he of these prints, that he wrote to his brother in September 1888:

“I envy the Japanese for the enormous clarity that pervades their work. It is never dull and never seems to have been made in haste. Their work is as simple as breathing and they draw a figure with a few well chosen lines with the same ease, as effortless as buttoning up one’s waistcoat….”

He meticulously copied Keisai Eisen’s print The Courtesan:

He actually saw this print in a magazine, Paris Illustré, and was so taken with it that he copied and enlarged it by tracing it on a grid. But his colour palette is brighter with bolder lines, by comparison with the original print. He also added Japanese motifs around the border of his portrait; many details are taken from works by Yoshimaru and Torakiyo. Van Gogh adds a tongue-in-cheek detail with the frogs in the border. In 19th Century France, prostitutes were referred to as grues or grenouilles (frogs).