Academy art museum to reopen in January

KOLKATA: Academy of Fine Arts’ museum will reopen from mid-January, after a gap of seven years. The museum, a repository of one of the finest and largest collections of paintings by eminent artists, mostly of the Bengal school, is undergoing renovation and will open partially. There will be a permanent exhibition of rare paintings and sketches of Rabindranath Tagore in the second week of January.
Sunday marked the beginning of a new chapter in the Academy’s 81-year-old history. After a gap of more than a decade, the governor attended the inauguration of the Academy’s annual art exhibition, now in its 79th year. The ceremony was attended by prominent members of the city’s cultural set and the exhibition itself attracted an unprecedented 500 entries, of which 205 were selected.
The exhibition, which will be on till January 11, features works by Ganesh Haloi, Ramananda Bandyopadhyay, Chandra Bhatta-
charjee, Manoj Sarkar, Wasim Kapoor and Rupchand Kundu. Governor Keshari Nath Tripathi presented Haloi with a lifetime achievement award named after the Academy’s founder Lady Ranu Mukherjee.
Tripathi also gave away awards to the winners of six categories of paintings and sculptures. The two-week event also features films on art and artists like ‘Inner Eye’ (on Binod Behari Mukherjee, directed by Satyajit Ray), ‘Prakash Karmakar – Agony Into Art’ (directed by Sandip Roy), ‘Dramas of Rabindranath Tagore’ (by K G Das), ‘Artist of the soil’ (on Ramkinkar Baij by Nitish Mukherjee), ‘An artist in him’ (on Satyajit Ray by Nitish Mukherjee) and ‘Mural Paintings of Orissa’ (directed by Raja Mitra).
Former Kolkata Police commissioner Prasun Mukherjee, who took over as chairman of the Academy’s board of trustees a few months ago, said that the Union government had sanctioned Rs 50 lakh for the restoration of paintings in the museum’s collection. Paintings by Binod Behari Mukherjee, Gaganendranath Tagore, Jamini Roy, Nandalal Basu, Gopal Ghosh and others, including sketches of the city by Desmond Doig, are in a bad shape after being stored carelessly in the museum’s vault. A team from the Lucknow-based National Research Laboratory for Conservation of Cultural property (NRLC) has prepared a survey report on restoring those paintings and some sculptures by Ramkinkar Baij. Work on the restoration started this month.
Bulbul Roy, joint secretary of the Academy’s executive committee, said that exciting times were ahead for the institution. “Once all the paintings are restored, this museum will be one of the best of its kind in the country. Our collection is better than that of even Visva Bharati,” she said. The Academy authorities have also prepared a detailed project report for the institution’s renovation and submitted it to the Union government.