A growing trend witnessed over the years is the opening of single artist dedicated spaces and museums for visitors to get a unique experience on the life and works of artists’ collections in studios, galleries confined to residences and summer homes. This year, the historic home of Indian modernist Jamini Roy was acquired by DAG gallery to create a private single-artist museum and cultural resource centre on his life, work and times. The museum is homage to the artist due to open next year.
While India has a lacuna of professionally run private art museums and there are no professionally run single-artist museums in the country, DAG hopes to fill the gap with the restoration of the 75-year-old historical house of the artist with the help of conservation architects and designers. It will be a mix of spaces like the artist’s studio and a selection of his paintings displayed as part of a permanent collection, galleries created for museum shows loaned by other museums and institutions of Jamini Roy’s works, as well as those that will feature his work as part of global artistic and cultural practices.
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“This is the single-most important project undertaken by DAG in its three decades. Art is one of the greatest, most democratic of tools we have for understanding social and cultural milieus of times past. In dedicating the Jamini Roy House Museum to the nation, the people of Bengal and all art lovers, we are ensuring the participation of people from all walks of life in this exercise,” says Ashish Anand, CEO & MD, DAG.
Jamini Roy carved himself a distinctive and individual path inspired by the local art and craft traditions of folk artists and sculptors, and was drawn to the simple aspects of Santhal life. In 1949, Jamini Roy moved from his modest Baghbazar home in north Calcutta to the genteel neighbourhood of Ballygunge Place, at the time an open area with bungalows in a neighbourhood occupied by professionals. Here, as his practice grew, so did his family, and the artist added rooms and floors to the home in which he lived till his passing away in 1972. Four years later, the Government of India declared him a national treasure artist.
Another comprehensive museum, and the largest in North America, is the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which is also the place of Andy Warhol’s birth. It is the largest collection of Warhol’s artworks and archival materials. Paintings, drawings, commercial illustrations, sculptures, prints, photographs, sketchbooks, and books cover the entire range of Warhol’s career, from his early student work to pop art paintings and collaborations. Vienna in Austria has a museum dedicated to Ernst Fuchs, who created works infused with eroticism and myth. Fucha was one of the founders of the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism in 1946. Dalí Theatre and Museum in Figueres, in Catalonia, Spain, is one fantastic self-curated collection from the artist Salvador Dalí himself. It is known for his unusual paintings of melting clocks and eccentric lifestyle and surrealist works, located in Dalí’s local childhood movie theatre. The theatre was destroyed during the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s but the artist in the 1960s recreated it as a museum to showcase his works.
The Van Gogh Museum since its opening in 1973 has welcomed millions of visitors to see the outstanding art. The Dutch art museum dedicated to the works of Vincent van Gogh and his contemporaries in the Museum Square in Amsterdam has the best collection of his works in the world, many of which had never left the Gogh family.
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Frida Kahlo Museum in Coyoacán in Mexico City was initially her home and the space and the content was donated by artists’ former husband Diego Rivera in 1957 in order to turn it into a museum in Kahlo’s honour. The house is filled with Kahlo and Rivera’s collection of contemporary Mexican folk art, pre-Hispanic artefacts, and personal effects, including the wheelchair and adjustable easel Kahlo used in her final years. The Museu Picasso by 20th-century Spanish artist Pablo Picasso is an art museum in Barcelona, in Catalonia, Spain. It houses an extensive collection of artworks with a total of 4,251 of his works.
