India has a lot of new institutions without an equal commitment to new art
It was a discreet act of philanthropy in 1962 that gave the Oslo University Hospital the untitled painting that would bring it a large fortune at a Christie’s auction in March 2025. The painting was originally purchased (apparently for Rs1400) from the Indian modernist M. F. Husain by a flamboyant Ukrainian-Norwegian thoracic surgeon, Leon Elias Voldarsky, while on a who mission to Delhi in 1954, and later bequeathed to the hospital in which he worked. Its more recent acquisition, for a reported US$13.8 million, made headlines back in the city in which it was painted. And where it is apparently destined to return, in what may or may not be another act of remarkable generosity – there’s a widespread expectation, but no confirmation so far, that the painting will soon be displayed at a museum in the capital. At any rate, the price of the Husain canvas set a record as the highest for a painting by an Indian artist. Christie’s announced, with customary discretion, that the purchase had been by an ‘unnamed institution’, but Indian news reports (and AI search engines) are emphatic in attributing it to a very well known individual, Kiran Nadar.
Nadar is, of course, something of an institution in the Indian artworld herself. A prominent collector, she’s the trustee of the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA), the core of which is her personal collection of modern and contemporary Indian art, soon to be housed at an enormous David Adjaye-designed cultural complex near the New Delhi airport. The new KNMA is slated to open in 2026, with six galleries, including permanent displays, studios and two auditoriums, covering close to 100,000 sqm, all told. Nadar is married to Shiv Nadar, an it multibillionaire who has endowed his own philanthropic foundations with more than a billion dollars. Kiran Nadar is emblematic – arguably the emblem – of the second (and still regnant) generation of art philanthropists from India’s corporate aristocracy. Others in this circle include Nita Ambani, whose sprawling Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre (NMACC) in Mumbai had a lavish opening in 2023. The complex of theatres and galleries cost an estimated US$14 million to build, not much more than the price of the record-breaking Husain, but Ambani, whose husband, Mukesh, is CEO of the energy-to-telecommunications conglomerate Reliance Industries, and the richest person in Asia (according to the Hurun list), also pipped Nadar to the No 1 spot on the Indian newsmagazine India Today’s ‘High & Mighty’ list for ‘artists and patrons’ in November 2024. The NMACC’s galleries have hosted an eclectic range of shows from contemporary Indian painters to art from the Bhakti tradition of Hindu devotion. It also features long-term installations, such as a work from Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms series. The NMACC theatres are known for staging elaborate shows that are high on razzle-dazzle. The inaugural spectacle staged here was The Great Indian Musical: Civilization to Nation. The most recent extravaganza, The Phantom of the Opera, attracted 55,000 viewers during its monthlong run in March.
Another contender in this pantheon is Sunil Munjal, who recently cashed out his stake in a multibillion-dollar motorcycle and scooter business and is bankrolling an ambitious ‘live museum’ called The Brij in New Delhi. ‘With one million square feet of experiential spaces, the first-of-its-kind museum will also be one of the largest in the world’, promises a promotional text. And Munjal is no newcomer to India’s arts space, having set up the multidisciplinary Serendipity Arts Festival, held annually in Goa since 2016. This colourful week-long event attracts audiences in the hundreds of thousands and is notable for mixing performances with a strong component of visual arts, sometimes curated by prominent artists such as Sudarshan Shetty or Thukral & Tagra. This year the festival is also going international, with a music-heavy ‘mini edition’ to be held in Birmingham in the UK at the end of May. Such cosmopolitan outreaches are not as uncommon today as they were in the time of the first state-sponsored (and corporate-subsidised) ‘Festivals of India’ that toured the West during the 1980s. The KNMA is now something of a veteran in Venice, and even the Jaipur Lit Fest has a London edition, while Nita Ambani is an Honorary Trustee of the Met and a member of its International Council.
Speaking to a range of artists, curators and, indeed, wealthy philanthropists (some of whom preferred to remain anonymous “for obvious reasons”) on the state of art philanthropy in India, I found a general, if predictable, consensus that India needs much more in the way of serious art philanthropy – both in terms of more serious money and a greater seriousness of intent. There was affection and admiration for some of the less-publicised ‘grassroots’ initiatives, such as the Arthshila Foundation, set up by Sanjiv Kumar (a former banker who later ran a very successful school franchise), which stages exhibitions and residencies beyond India’s ‘metros’, and for the institutions built on famous artists’ legacies, notably the Gujral Foundation, the Raza Foundation and the Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation. Unsurprisingly, I also encountered some sniffyness towards individuals of extreme wealth, whose initiatives were often looked at askance as ‘asset building’, focused on enhancing the value of their own art hoards and cultural capital, rather than encouraging emerging artists and the ‘art ecosystem’. “I see a negative effect on young artists,” one well-known installation artist told me. “They are troubled by the anxiety of insignificance, of not making it to the monied institutions.”
“Art philanthropy is in very poor health,” said the collector Abhishek Poddar. A prominent philanthropist himself, he set up the impressive Museum of Art & Photography (MAP), with a core collection of 7,000 artworks donated by his family and a notably names such as Sheba Chhachhi and Bharti Kher, alongside a deft smattering of Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst and the inevitable Husain). She has her own art foundation, of course, the Shalini Passi Art Foundation, and a digital platform called mash (My Art Shalini), and has contributed selectively to other initiatives, like the Delhi-based not-for-profit Khoj and the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. Over the past year, however, her fame has skyrocketed, thanks to the popularity of her demurely outrageous persona in appearances on reality tv shows. With 1.5 million followers on Instagram, she’s hot off a viral stint on the reality show Fabulous Lives vs Bollywood Wives. Yet Passi traces her art habit to a teacher who introduced her to famous artists like B.C. Sanyal and Manjit Bawa (also cited by Poddar as a ‘guru’) back in the day. “Being tech-forward approach to engaging visitors. Among its highlights is an AI-powered hologram of M.F. Husain, trained to respond to questions using every available utterance of the great man, written or recorded, as a dataset. MAP opened its doors to the public in Bangalore in 2023. “The art market is booming, but these are collectors, and most of them are buying artists who are dead,” Poddar told me.
Poddar is of course a businessman himself, running the family line of enterprises from tea to explosives and mining accessories. But he seems to regret the impact of market forces that have transformed the country’s artworld since the economic liberalisation of the early 1990s. “There was more real philanthropy and people who were genuinely interested in art in the 1970s and 80s”, he says, complaining that the artworld is increasingly “playing it safe and doing what sells”.
Ironically, that nostalgia for the heyday of modernist art, in that quieter, gentler Indian economy of the late twentieth century, is a pervasive sentiment. Even for Shalini Passi, who arguably belongs to a new category, and generation, of celebrity influencer-philanthropists. Passi comes from considerable wealth herself (her husband heads the Pasco Group, best known for its car dealerships and a turnover in the billions of rupees) and built a public persona in the artworld by virtue of her personal collection (featuring respected Indian contemporary names such as Sheba Chhachhi and Bharti Kher, alongside a deft smattering of Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst and the inevitable Husain). She has her own art foundation, of course, the Shalini Passi Art Foundation, and a digital platform called mash (My Art Shalini), and has contributed selectively to other initiatives, like the Delhi-based not-for profit Khoj and the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. Over the past year, however, her fame has skyrocketed, thanks to the popularity of her demurely outrageous persona in appearances on reality tv shows. With 1.5 million followers on Instagram, she’s hot off a viral stint on the reality show Fabulous Lives vs Bollywood Wives. Yet Passi traces her art habit to a teacher who introduced her to famous artists like B.C. Sanyal and Manjit Bawa (also cited by Poddar as a ‘guru’) back in the day. “Being around that kind of creative energy from such a young age left a lasting impact on me,” she says. Sunil Munjal’s passion too was sparked by an inspirational art teacher, the legendary illustrator Rathin Mitra, and he began collecting art while still a schoolboy, starting with artists of the Bengal School and, later, works of the Progressive Artists Group, of Husain and his cohort.
Even Kiran Nadar’s record-breaking Husain purchase could be seen as a nostalgic and affectionate settling of scores. When I interviewed her at the opening of the Husain show (The Rooted Nomad) that she staged as an unofficial India pavilion on the fringes of the Venice Biennale last year, she remembered that the artist “didn’t take me seriously” in her early years as an enthusiastic art patron, when she wanted to commission some canvases for her new home. The late artist was himself a famously generous person who plainly savoured wealth and believed that philanthropy begins at home. He was also notoriously competitive about getting higher prices than his peers at auction. The homecoming of Unitled (1954), already widely known as Gram Yatra, at the KNMA, would be a fitting act of philanthropy in more ways than one.
Kai Jabir Friese is a journalist and editor based in New Delhi
ArtReview’s May 2025 issue is accompanied by a standalone publication on philanthropy in the arts, with essays exploring funding models in North and South America, Africa, Europe and Asia, profiles of four prominent philanthropists and a guide to philanthropic initiatives around the world. This publication was created with the support of Durjoy Bangladesh Foundation, Han Nefkens Foundation, Levett Collection and Sunpride Foundation.
