Mona Lisa would have been mighty thrilled. The enigmatic artist Bharat Dalal, who channelled Leonardo da Vinci so intensely that he believed he was the master’s reincarnation, was a Renaissance Man who never sold his paintings. Recalls his one-time associate Sunit Joshi, “The right person has to buy them. Others won’t understand them”. Dalal’s family has opened his da Vinci collection to New York’s cognoscenti and art mavens, obeying his last wish. The younger brother had promised that the da Vinci collection would be revealed to the world. The immense size of the canvases had made them difficult to be shipped home to Mumbai. Beyond Borders: The Fossilized Passions of Da Vinci, A Retrospective Art Exhibition in Tribute to Bharat Dalal dedicated to the 75th Year Celebration of Indian Independence, is a moving homage to unfettered imagination.
Joshi recalls Dalal inviting her in 1982 to join his dream project—Metamorphosis. They flew to Los Angeles when Dalal was just 27. Infected by Dalal’s intensity, Joshi’s brother Satish offered his garage as the studio. The result was the six-piece installation. Any art expert would quickly realise that Dalal had an out-of-the-box mind. Joshi was to Dalal what Francesco Melsi was to Leonardo, working as his apprentice for five years to complete Metamorphosis—six artworks inspired the Italian great.
The measurements of the times were not as compromising as today. “All the available canvases were of a smaller size. Art shops promised to make customised frames and stretch the canvases to fit, but the charges were exorbitant,” Joshi remembers. Being Indian, jugaad it was. Master and apprentice selected the wood, bought carpentry tools, cut, planed and hammered until a few weeks on, they had the right-sized frames. The space for paint was left exposed while the rest of the surface was covered with contact paper.
They hung the canvases horizontally like swings. “Dalal would pour white paint on the exposed sections, while the rest of the canvas was protected by contact paper. He added a few drops of red in the fluid white space. We kept tilting them both ways, splashing red and purple paint dots into intriguing swirls,” explains Joshi. Dalal was the protagonist of his own narrative. He felt he had a duty to solve a da Vinci mystery but not in Tom Hanks fashion.
An international artist of Indian origin, he was in truth an explorer of the mystery of da Vinci’s creations. He felt he had developed the meaning and method of the master’s unfinished works. “Art has no boundaries. Some use the motifs of their homeland while some have other inspirations. Therefore, analysing art based on the artist’s origin may not be accurate,” says Martin Kemp, Oxford Professor and art historian, and world-renowned scholar and expert on Leonardo da Vinci. Dalal had used the maestro’s paintings to send a specific message, and not just reproduce them.
Art that exhausts needs an auxiliary art to revive. Dalal’s was the sitar, and that too one which he designed himself. Playing it both energised and relaxed him. The sitar was his constant companion during the five years he spent creating “The Fossilized Passions of da Vinci”. “Dalal identified with da Vinci at a very deep level. It was a connection which he did not speak of very often. But many times I heard him say ‘I am he’,” Kemp says.
Dalal was not a one-dimensional man. He saw himself as da Vinci, Salvador Dali fascinated him. Dalal’s favourite fictional character was Psmith from PG Wodehouse; so impressed was he by Psmith and Dali that he even sported a monocle for a while. This man of many talents maintained that completing the paintings was more important than selling them.
Once the canvases were completed, Dalal and Joshi pondered over ways to make them accessible to galleries. An expert’s opinion would go a long way, they knew. They chose Prof Carlo Pedretti, a foremost da Vinci scholar. Dalal took pictures of his works and sent it to Pedretti. For Dalal just FedExing some slides was not enough. He, like da Vinci, decided to be inventive and mysterious. Says Joshi, “Bharat created a Brazilian rosewood box. The end result was an amazing cube with an invisible lid. A box that cannot be opened unless you knew where to press. It was a worthy container for the slides. We sent the photos, but we never heard from him.” Maybe for a da Vinci expert, Pedretti wasn’t that clever after all. Joshi continues, “Our search for an agent and a gallery was rather disappointing.” The works cover the journey of the soul to achieve Nirvana—after all, the artist believed in reincarnation.
In Memoriam The six-piece installation was on display at the Consulate General of India in New York City between August 25 and 27