Parbhakar Barwe’s painting disappeared?

The first thing I saw as I entered the Air India exhibition ‘Maharaja’s Treasure’ at NGMA in Mumbai was the orange-coloured painting by the legendary painter Gaitonde, followed by the paintings of Hussain, Raza, and Ara. On the second floor, I saw another amazing painting by Gaitonde. But at the same time, my eyes were searching for Prabhakar Barwe’s painting, which was nowhere to be seen till then. Not even in the hall on the last floor. I didn’t know whom to ask. All the staff of the NGMA were busy with the inauguration ceremony. Besides, there were limited copies of the exhibition catalogue, probably printed for the inauguration only. So, I couldn’t get hold of that too. I wondered, such a large art collection by Air India and it does not have the painting of all-time best painter of India, Prabhakar Barwe?! The question kept bothering me.

By the time I reached home, it was late and since it had started raining, I got fed up with searching for some clue about this. But the next day, I found the reference. It was the calendar published by Air India in 2004. It had the paintings of Raza, Laxman Shrestha, Ara, Sakti Burman, Achuthan Kudallur, Arpana Caur, Anjoli Ela Menon, Jitish Kallat, N Krishna Reddy, Gaitonde, and Prabhakar Barwe. In fact, I had a collection of many such calendars by Air India. But in the meantime, I got so fed up with maintaining all of it that I disposed of most of those.

But I guess I held back the 2004 calendar as I wanted to work on the art by Gaitonde and Barwe. It contained the above-mentioned Orange-coloured painting by Gaitonde. Along with one of Barwe’s too. This means there was a painting of Prabhakar Barwe in Air India’s collection. Also, I found ‘Commissioned by Air-India’ mentioned in the caption under Barwe’s painting. To my knowledge, Prabhakar Barwe had never done any commissioned work. So, why was this mentioned in the calendar? And if it was done, a very valid question comes to mind. Where did the painting go?

Whoever curated this exhibition, had they even seen the previous calendars published by Air India? If they did not, why not? Wasn’t that their job? And if the curator had seen it, wasn’t it their duty to find out where this painting of Prabhakar Barwe is? Why was the curator not surprised that the painting of such a great Indian painter was not there in Air India’s collection?

For years, there have been whispers in the art world about Air India’s art collection. For example, some of the paintings have surprisingly ‘disappeared’ from the collection. They got ‘destroyed’, so on and so forth. Could something similar have happened to Barwe’s painting? Barwe’s paintings have recently been sold at auctions for crores of rupees. So, such thoughts can surely come to anyone’s mind.

But then, who will answer all these questions? Could this have happened during the period when Air India came back to Tatas from the Government? There definitely must be a record of this somewhere. These records should be found by the people concerned because the artworks of Barwe or any other artist are valuable national treasures.

Satish Naik

Chief Editor

Chinha Art News