By (Mrs) Amb Narinder Chauhan
The Museum of Naïve and Marginal Arts (MNMA) of Serbia has countless collections of artists from all over the world. Its collection has 3500 artworks by more than 400 artists from the 1930s until today, including Sava Sekulic, Vojislav Jakic, Bogoslav Zivkovic etc. My connection with the Museum began when the Museum Director Nina Ristic contacted me with the proposal to install Nek Chand’s Rock Garden in the Museum. I could not have asked for more.
The Museum is in Jagodina. It is a specialized institution, unique in the territory of Serbia, with a special programme for the protection of the naïve and marginal art. It is one of the cultural institutions founded by the Republic of Serbia for supporting cultural heritage and development of modern art of the country. It was established in 1960 in Jagodina, first as a Gallery of Self-taught artists.In 1985 it received the name Museum of Naïve Art to be renamed into Museum of Naïve and Marginal Art in 2007. The Museum has been systematically working on the protection of the work of naïve art, mainly Serbian and Yugoslav, to which international works were added in 1994. Today, the fund of the Museum, international in its character, has more than 3,500 art works.
As per several criteria, the collection of the MNMA in Jagodina is one of the most important collections of naïve art in the world. It houses works from Serbia and other parts of former Yugoslavia together with scientific research and field work through which the development and progress of certain artists can be monitored. The State support has enabled the Museum to organize various thematic exhibitions, besides one man shows and group exhibitions both in the country and abroad, which offer a better view into the nature and the contents of naïve arts. This has been made possible by the team of experts from the Museum who works on the realization of numerous programmes and activities.
According to the Museum Association of Serbia,‘the Museum has a delicate job, to give naïve artists complete and adequate protection, thus disseminating true idea of its essence and real artistic value, separating it from other forms of non-academic work, the field of amateur and dilettantism’. The most important result of this long-lasting effort is that many deep-rooted dilemmas and illusions about the specific field of naïve and marginal art has been explained. ‘This form of art is properly viewed among professional circles and evaluated as a constituent of contemporary, equal to academic art’, according to the Museum Association of Serbia.
Through 35 years of its existence, the museum has realized 600 exhibitions in the country and abroad. In 2017, the Museum organized one among many such exhibitions of paintings and sculptures of the artists from Serbia entitled ‘Turbulences on the Balkans’. It was at Paris a couple of years earlier than that that this team of researchers had spotted the Nek Chand Rock Garden on display where Nina was similarly participating with exhibits from the Museum. Nina was very impressed with the Nek Chand Rock Gardenand she on the spot offered to host the exhibition in her Museum. This suited Nek Chand promoters well because of the added reason that it would save them the expense of transporting the exhibition back to India.
It brought immense joy to me when the Nek Chand Rock Garden found its honoured place as a permanent exhibit at the Museum of Naïve and Marginal Art, Jagodina which I had the pleasure of visiting and inaugurating.With this began institutional cooperation between the Embassy of India and the Museum. For this, my heartfelt thanks go to Nina Ristic, the Director of the Museum and an art historian in her own right, who has indefatigably nurtured the Museum, growing with it over the decades. I have treasured the two paintings that Nina gifted to me as also the bagful of Museum calendars, diaries and other memorabilia that I from time to time received from her.
Subsequently, on 5th October 2017, the exhibition of Nek Chand’s Rock Garden was organized at the iconic Kalemegdan fortress in the capital city of Belgrade, sponsored by the Ministry of Culture and information of Serbia and Embassy of India. Book promotion, film projection, exhibition of advertised material were added attractions. The exhibition featured the launch of a monograph and a short film on the great artist Nek Chand. The monograph was authored by Nina Krstic, Director of the Museum and the short film was made by Anuj Saini, son of Nek Chand, who visited Serbia from Chandigarh for the occasion.
The largest and the most populated among the ex-Yugoslav countries, Serbia has always been pro-India and art and culture have helped bring the two nations closer. I felt very honored to be associated with the MNMA in preserving Nek Chand’s iconic sculptures for future generations. Nek Chand has been among the foremost self-taught artists in the world and his extraordinary achievement in building the 25-acre Rock Garden in Chandigarh, India, complete with 2000 statues, waterfalls and amphitheaters, is unsurpassed. He popularized the term ‘outsider art’ in India which means raw art or self-taught art where the artist has no formal art training from any institution or has no connection with the mainstream art world. Nek Chand will always be remembered for his artistic genius and fabulous creation that is cherished by many across the world.
The permanent exhibition of the Nek Chand Rock Garden at the Museum of Naïve and Marginal Arts, Jagodina, is a significant effort to make the development of India-Serbia relations even more inclusive. I hope this will inspire partners in India to make a reciprocal gesture and host the exhibition of the rare collections of the Museum of Naïve and Marginal Arts of Serbia. Personally, it would be a privilege to meet my friend Nina Krstic again, as I did in Prague in 2019 when she had invited me to her exhibition from the Museum.
(The author is a former Indian ambassador to the Republic of Serbia. She tweets:@nchauhanifs Views expressed are personal and do not reflect the official position or policy of Financial Express Online. Reproducing this content without permission is prohibited).
