Sabyasachi Mukherjee unveils his art foundation painter Atish Mukherjee's debut at Nilaya Anthology

The two worlds of Sabyasachi Mukherjee spread across two floors of the Nilaya Anthology in Mumbai are like twins separated at birth. Upstairs, standing close to a tablescape, is a toy tiger on a four-poster bed, freed, as it were, from the job of being on the brand logo. Downstairs in his gallery is an artist who has just let out his first roar. Atish Mukherjee of Kolkata, a former animator of children’s literature and one of the 15 artists nurtured by The Sabyasachi Art Foundation, has sold out each of his 12 paintings during the debut, and the only showcase by the foundation on February 28. The event was also tied to the opening of Nilaya, a 1,00,000-sq-ft space, presented by Asian Paints, that aims to be a destination for curated premium and luxury home décor made by top-notch international and domestic artists and designers. What was different about the occasion was that Sabyasachi, though the focus of the event, was not at its centre.

Sabyasachi Mukherjee on Atish Mukherjee's debut at Nilaya Anthology

“If you are buying furniture and linen for the home, you also need art,” said Sabyasachi to explain why Nilaya Anthology made the perfect setting for the launch of his painter. “Nilaya is a great confluence of design. I wanted Atish to have the exposure in a space where he would get buyers from around the world. At Nilaya, his work is in its only art gallery and his art has been priced like art.”

Sabyasachi Mukherjee is one of India’s feted designers and beloved cultural ambassadors. That afternoon as he stood talking to guests near his permanent art gallery at Nilaya Anthology, it was as if he had scripted for himself a new role — that of an impresario giving a build-up before the curtains went up on the opera. In time, Atish, he said, “will be Souza and more… In my lifetime if I can produce two great artists, I will consider the job well done”. The stakes raised, it was the time for a handshake here, and a hug there, as he led the way for a walkthrough. If Atish is the first big thing to come out of the foundation, the message is that there will be others. The plan is also to support artists with potential — from and outside of Bengal.

A new Bengal school of art

Set up 11 years ago, Sabya — as he is called by the industry — said the foundation was built on two divergent ideas, which in Atish’s case worked out as support for his art. “I started the foundation to give artists a platform, make available for them a studio, give them the finest brushes, better paper, so that they could practise art at the highest level. But to make it sustainable, I decided to commercialise. I did collaborations. All through, one artist stood out. I decided Atish would not create art for the company but do art for himself.”

The afternoon also saw him unveil his ambitions of reviving “the Bengal School of Art”, not necessarily the early 20th century style of painting that revolved around Shantiniketan and Calcutta, but a new practice in which artists draw from and are “influenced by geography but not be limited by it”. So, when Sabya says Bengal, he may mean a mood or a craft but not a fixed style or place. I went down a blind alley, for instance, when looking for red earth and Bengal’s bauls in his Shantiniketan upholstery fabric — with a rose background and women figures standing under coconut palms — hung in neat folds in a closet in a Sabyasachi-red room upstairs. “When Karl Lagerfeld named one of his collections Paris-Bombay, he said he didn’t have to go to India to do this. An artist’s job is not to replicate reality,” said Sabya. “We don’t have to be parochial about names. Shantiniketan does and should belong to everybody.”

Similar to his disruptions in fashion — his daring colour clashes in his garments, his indigoisms in khadis — Sabya also seems to be backing a new practice of art — the art of the atelier. He then exhibits that art with all senses fired — the walkthrough in his art gallery was awash with jazz and a ’60s siren song from Tollywood; besides the addition of new details to make up a new tradition. Atish, like atelier masters of yore, “heads” the work of the foundation but is also free to pursue his own art. The material of his paintings may be Kumartuli earth (the clay of the area where the idols of Bengal’s gods and goddesses are sculpted), the technique gouache, but his figures for this collection, androgynous and all nudes, recalled Bhupen Khakkar. The eyes, both alert and inward looking, mirrored Atish’s own.

“When you look at his work, you wouldn’t think it could come out from my foundation. A Raja Ravi Varma steeped in nostalgia could have. Atish’s work is independent of me,” said Sabya.

Truth be told, if asked to trace the ‘Bengal school of fashion’, too, its doors and windows do not open onto the same street. “Anamika (Khanna) and I both represent radically different ideas but are similar. The apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree,” said Sabya. “For me, the Bengal school of art is not about being bombastic, but about poetic strength.” Think of the Antwerp Six, he explains further. “Six avant-garde fashion designers all from the Antwerp’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts in the ’80s but all different,” he added.

Art in his veins

Sabya’s mother was an artist who chose family over her vocation and became an art teacher. The art in his home was the standard showcase-hoard — from calendar art and grandparents’ portraits to novels bought off College Street, Kolkata’s book street. His mother’s art was modernist, “it had a lot of clean lines, it spoke to me like Gaughin’s work did”. Frida Kahlo, Amrita Sher-Gil are his all-time muses; if he could buy them, he said, he would have them on the same wall side by side. On his wall now at home is a painting of Dhruvi Acharya, who like Édouard Manet — also a Sabya favourite — is a painter of urban life textured with dark humour.

“I have one of her paintings in which a woman has blurbs coming out of her ears. She reminds me of myself,” he said. “Bengalis value art that is personal to them. It’s not social. The grandmother’s four-poster bed is a prized heirloom. We wouldn’t buy something thinking we must buy something because someone will be an important artist someday and having it will make me a person of status.” The conversation had by now moved up to the second floor of Nilaya in a space carved up into lavish little ante rooms that are not for living but for passing by, room to room, wallpaper to wallpaper, one hanging light to another, till one has run one’s hand on every velvety armchair or lampshade and felt embarrassed to realise that the curiosity towards them is the curiosity one reserves for persons, not things.

This space is Sabya’s fantasyland — just like each space at Nilaya Anthology. “Each corner defines his different worlds. It’s to let the customer know how he views spaces and how it unfolds in his imagination,” said Pavitra Rajaram, creative director, Nilaya Anthology, as she stands before a table where Chinese tea salon aesthetics meets a college professor’s study elevated to some other level. There was a banquet of books here, as were ceramic sets, Java statues, plants, glass bottles and canisters. Earlier in the day, Sabya had referred to the space as one dedicated to his maximalist maternal grandmother. The gallery downstairs, he had said, was dedicated to his minimalist paternal grandmother. As we wound down our conversation, he read out a poem on his idea of aging well and staying young. In the poem is an old woman who wears satin sandals and terrible shirts. But if there is a beautiful flower to pick in another garden, she will run out even if there is rain.

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