Artful Buys
As an art writer for a few years now, I’ve come to terms with the fact that I can’t actually afford to own a lot of high art. Or any, for that matter, if I were to apply the conventional definition of a canvas painting or an installation sourced from a gallery with the help of a dealer. So I scrimp through with consolation buys: a print of a Nathdwara pichhwai, a frayed-at-the-edges Johnny Mera Naam lobby card, a hand-painted Madhubani dupatta. I repurpose exhibition invitations and flyers into little installations of my own. At house parties, I’m neurotic about my tiny, but precious, stash of art books and carefully steer any wine-bearing guests away from my bookshelf.
My generous friends always chip in to populate my fledgling collection. They find me bookmarks imprinted with panels from Mughal miniatures, purchase Amrita Sher-Gil prints knowing I will love them, and gift me photographs they’ve shot. Every once in a while, they also ensure that I pick the right cut-price fake; that’s how I came to own a masterful copy of Salvador Dalí’s 1937 surrealist classic, Le Sommeil (Sleep).
The centre of the canvas is occupied by a large, deflated brown head, supported by crutches, a motif Dalí repeated across paintings. While Sleep isn't as famous as the melting clocks from The Persistence of Memory, it’s recognisable to anyone with a little background in art history. As it was to my friend Ritesh Uttamchandani, a city photographer, who spotted it lying outside a kabadiwalla’s shop in Bandra, and immediately knew I’d be thrilled to have it. It isn’t particularly pretty, as most examples of surreal art tend to be, but I’m rather attached to it. It has a quiet, melancholic quality. There’s a dog in a corner of the frame.
At first, Ritesh and I wanted to track down the artist who’d made such an accurate copy of the painting, so I tried picking the dealer’s brains about its antecedents. But all I got out of him was that it had belonged to a family down the road that had recently moved to Delhi. He then tried to sell me their fridge for a hefty discount, promising to throw in two garden-variety sketches of Egyptian maidens. I, however, only brought Sleep into my living room, much to the fascination of Swapna didi , who used to cook and help around the house. I spotted her transfixed in front of it a few times, proffering a new explanation at each instance. She hit the nail on the head the first time she saw it, calling it an example of fractured sleep; gradually, though, she extrapolated it as a comment on the condition of perpetual exhaustion that we seem to be in. And so, Sleep continues to hang in my living room, moving houses with me, entertaining delivery boys who want to take selfies with it and unsuspecting new friends who nearly always believe my fib that it’s the Dalí original. It might be a counterfeit, but I measure its value not by the Rs 1,500 I paid for it, but by the conversations it has yielded. And those, are always genuine.