Evelyn Haas, philanthropist, patron of the arts, matriarch of one of the Bay Area’s most prominent families and expert fly-fisherwoman, died Wednesday in San Francisco at age 92.

Mrs. Haas, widow of Walter A. Haas Jr., led the family foundation, the Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Fund, which has contributed more than $364 million to hundreds of community and cultural organizations that make the Bay Area what it is. They include the San Francisco Symphony, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the restoration of Crissy Field and The Chronicle’s Season of Sharing Fund. The Haas family also owned the Oakland Athletics from 1980 to 1995, a period cherished, and missed, by many Bay Area baseball fans.

Friends and civic leaders said that Mrs. Haas was as comfortable wading in a trout stream or walking around Crissy Field as she was enjoying a concert at Davies Symphony Hall or perusing an exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She was passionate about those interests, but more concerned that everyone would get to share them.

“She didn’t like to talk about her philanthropy,” said Ira Hirschfield, president of the foundation. “What was really important to Evie was that it make a difference and touch people’s lives in tangible ways.

“It was about leveling the playing field so that all families could live and raise their families with equality and dignity, to make sure all families had an equal chance to enjoy their lives,” he said.

Greg Moore, executive director of the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, said that desire was what drove Mrs. Haas to lead the effort to restore Crissy Field, which was completed in 1999. “Today it is just a beautiful place, which is what she wanted – to create a beautiful place that everyone could use and enjoy.”

From the time she studied for her bachelor’s degree at Wheaton College in Massachusetts, Mrs. Haas had a passion for the arts. After she and her husband married and moved to San Francisco in 1940, she grew to love the Symphony and SFMOMA. She was a longtime leader on the museum’s board, and she and her husband were instrumental in raising the $95 million to build the new museum in 1995. He died later that year.

“SFMOMA was the love of her life – except for her husband, Walter, and her children,” said Elaine McKeon, former president of the museum. “But she was just the sweetest person, interested in everyone she met. She was a real mentor to me.”

San Francisco Symphony music director Michael Tilson Thomas said Mrs. Haas, who served on the Symphony board for 40 years, loved classical music and wanted others to learn to love it, too. She helped to do that by funding “Keeping Score: MTT on Music,” a classical music program for children on public radio, television and the Internet.

“You got the impression from Evie that she had a real passion and interest in the Symphony, that it was a delight for her and that she wanted to share it with other people,” Thomas said.

But Haas didn’t confine her interests to the arts and philanthropy. She was an avid fly fisher – an interest she picked up from her husband. In 1979, she co-authored the book “Wade a Little Deeper, Dear,” considered a classic among fly fishers.

“I met her through her foundation,” said John McCosker, senior scientist at the California Academy of Sciences, and a friend, “but I also knew her because she and Wally were mad about fly fishing. That was a side of her most people didn’t know.”

Mrs. Haas is survived by her three children: Robert D. Haas, chairman emeritus and past CEO of Levi Strauss & Co., and his wife, Colleen Gershon Haas; Betsy Haas Eisenhardt, civic leader and volunteer, and her husband, Roy Eisenhardt; and Walter J. Haas, co-chairman of the Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Fund and past chairman and CEO of the Oakland Athletics, and his wife, Julie Salles Haas. She is also survived by six grandchildren, Elise Haas, Jesse Eisenhardt, Sarah Eisenhardt, Simone Haas Zumsteg, Charlotte Haas Prime and Walter A. Haas III; great-grandson Andy Zumsteg; and great-granddaughter Olivia Evelyn Prime.

For 15 years, Qatar-based Indian artist Smita Aloni has been painting to help preserve a dying art form which dates back 1500 AD.

Aloni was the featured artist on the first-ever art exhibition recently organised by Standard Chartered Bank Qatar. Bank officials, parents, children and guests attended the successful one-day exhibition held at Standard Chartered D-Ring Road Branch.

Phad painting is a traditional Indian art form based on an epic in praise of the good deeds of King Pabuji. It is derived from the word ‘par’ which literally means ‘scroll’ in the local language. The scroll painting which was originally about 15ft in length and four to five feet high was used by storytellers to narrate the epic.

“This art form is not commonly known since it was restricted to one part of India,” Aloni explained.

She said the art form has been preserved through family tradition passing it from one generation to another but is threatened to disappear because very few artists nowadays practice the art form since it requires a lot of patience to make and does not guarantee good financial rewards.

Using hand made brushes and natural colours sourced from India, Aloni creates her paintings following very detailed style for them to look authentically phad. Her wide collection spans 10 years of dedication to the traditional art.

‘Scenes from the Palace’, ‘Procession of King’ and ‘Mythological Elephant’ were some of Aloni’s notable paintings exhibited during the exposition.

Apart from being a professional artist, Aloni also teaches painting to children, from whom she said she derived much inspiration from.

An exhibition of dozens of works by the children was also held. The paintings revolved around a theme on French Art following the technique of legendary French painter Rousseau.

The paintings depicted animals, forests, flowers, sun, moon and other objects of nature. Collage and paper mache art including glass, tile and ceramic paintings were also put on display.

“For more people to appreciate this art form, artists should make it simpler, such as lessening the number of characters for each painting,” Aloni said, as she showed examples of silk paintings in which she focused on just one central character.

The Whitechapel Gallery’s scan of photography from the Indian subcontinent is enormous. One hundred and fifty years, three countries, several hundred works (from the documentary tradition, the private, the commercial, from contemporary-art … ). Poor photography, still the last medium in which such sweeping gestures are considered to make any sense. The result of the ambition of this show is that it has to skate almost trivially over vast acreages of great interest. It makes a wonderful invitation to seek more detail, but it provides little detail itself.

The impulse for the exhibition is both laudable and negative. The very rich presence (both past and present) of photography in south Asia has many aspects which do not fit into patterns dictated by the history of photography as written in Europe and the United States. So this exhibition, unlike many earlier, seeks to show only works by photographers from the region and to allow their expressions of cultural values to be heard in their own context. This is worthy enough, but it is lopsided. From the earliest days of photography in the mid-19th century, its development on the subcontinent was influenced by developments in Europe. To try to look the other way is perhaps a necessary shove to a pendulum which has been stuck on the Eurocentric side for too long, but it is an adversarial position and not a neutral scholarly one.Spread over two floors of the large gallery space, the show looks oddly drab on the lower floor and much more lively above. It is arranged thematically and not by date, and the curators follow five threads (the portrait, performance, the family, the street, and the body politic). These are more or less arbitrary, and they intersect often.

The grouping allows for lively comparisons, and provides a minimum of necessary guidance to European viewers in a maze of mostly new names and stories. But the stories, in truth, are better told in the book which accompanies the exhibition. On the walls are lots of pictures with minimal context, a kaleidoscope of snippets.

It is full of fascinating and lovely things. Here is a doorkeeper from the 1880s by the great Lala Deen Dayal, tiny against his massive studded door, with the sweep of shadow across the great door matched by the sweep of his dark cloak across his belly. Here is an exciting construction from 2007 by Rashid Rana in which the repeating pattern of the surface treatment of the twin towers in New York is made of thousands of little views of street-scenes in Lahore – Rana’s point being that the great shining vertical cities are often made by the labour of those who live in the sprawling dusty horizontal ones.

Here, too, is Umrao Singh Sher-Gil prancing about in his underpants on a bed in Paris looking like the villainous fakir in the “Tintin” books. Far from being a comic figure, however, Sher-Gil is of great importance in the story of Indian photography. Born to an aristocratic Punjabi family in 1870, he was a linguist and classical scholar as well as an enthusiast for craft skills like carpentry and calligraphy. He married a Hungarian opera singer and spent a large proportion of the 1920s and 1930s in Budapest and Paris, from where he brought back all that was newest in photography. But he had been an enthusiast for years: his early pictures date from the late 1880s, and he was perhaps among the very first in India to adopt the autochrome process of the Lumière brothers.

Umrao Sher-Gil was the father of the painter Amrita Sher-Gil (who died young in the 1940s) and the grandfather of the contemporary artist Vivan Sundaram. Both of these have a part to play in this exhibition, where Sundaram reworks his grandfather’s pictures by a form of computerised collage which is both a tender dip in the family archive and a more acerbic contemplation of the various parts taken by photography as catalyst or protagonist in personal identification.

The exhibition is full of links of this kind. A pleasing one is in the simple portrait by S.B. Syed from the 1850s of a woman hand-tinting a photograph. The presence of hand-tinting reminds us that the glorious tradition of miniature painting was not replaced by photography in India so much as teamed with it. Here, the meticulously detailed jewellery on the female sitter turns out to be the same as that worn by the artist who is seen painting it. Did the jewellery belong to the studio, to lend a certain social cachet to the fee-paying sitters? It seems likely. In Europe, gilding the photographic lily by hand-tinting fell (under modernist pressure) to the status of tastelessness. In India, not so.

To demonstrate that a separate photographic culture exists in India is the point of the show, and it does that well. It is to be hoped that it acts as an invitation to others to fill in the gaps, because this show, for all its vastness, is only a tentative beginning of a story that will continue to be told. It’s also a challenge to get full value from a show which achieves a great deal at the ultimate expense of depth

While Saatchi’s new show of Indian art, The Empire Strikes Back, is a talking point in London, the market for Indian art has taken some serious hits. At the height of the boom this was fever-hot, as speculators shifted from Chinese contemporary (which had become very expensive) into Indian art. Prices soared and art funds mushroomed, led by Osian’s, India’s oldest art auction house. Its Rs100 crore (£13m) fund was launched in 2006; among those that followed was the Copal Art fund, which sold investors art based on a price-per-square-foot. Between 2006 and 2008, according to the Indian business newspaper Livemint, some Rs300 crore was invested in art.

But recently Indian artists have, in some cases, lost over 70 per cent of their value, and some funds are failing to deliver promised returns. Osian’s fund closed at the end of last year, but not all investors have been paid; founder Neville Tuli told the FT that they will be paid by February 24 and admitted that the fund was “disappointing”. Osian’s is also mired in a US-based lawsuit with Christie’s, which it accuses of failing to deliver art it had bought; Menaka Kumari Shah, India representative of the firm, said: “We have been seeking to recover a significant debt from an Osian-related party for more than one year. Christie’s intends to review all of its legal remedies in response to these baseless allegations.”

The problem is not confined to art funds; Bodhi Art, one of India’s most flamboyant galleries, has become the highest-profile victim of the bust. At the height of its glory, the gallery had outlets in Berlin, Singapore, New York, Mumbai and New Delhi; now all are closed except Mumbai.

Next week, impressionist and modern art goes under the hammer in London. Christie’s goes first, on Tuesday evening with a 86-lot sale estimated at up to £80m, but the story is more about Sotheby’s sale on Wednesday. This is smaller, with 39 lots but a higher target of £102m, and it boasts three surefire winners. Giacometti’s imposing sculpture “L’Homme qui marche”, a lifetime cast from 1961 estimated at £12m-£18m, could shatter the world record for the artist. It is being sold by the German-based Dresdner, which was bought by Commerzbank last year. Cézanne’s “Pichet et fruits sur une table” (1893-94) is one of the artist’s highly desirable still lifes of apples and while it is unlikely to break the world record for Cézanne (£36.9m, made in 1999) it should still do very well at its estimate of £10m-£15m. The third cracker is a recently restituted Klimt landscape, “Kirche in Cassone” (1913), a highly attractive work with broad appeal, estimated at £12m-£18m.

Auction house specialists report a distinct loosening up of vendors’ willingness to sell, compared to last year. “We’re not talking about a return to boom times yet,” says Christie’s specialist Olivier Camu, “but buyers are buzzing around and general confidence is up.”

While some galleries may be downsizing, the international dealership Hauser & Wirth is expanding in the heart of Mayfair. The gallery has bagged the entire ground floor at 23 Savile Row, site of the former English Heritage headquarters. It will open this autumn with an exhibition of Louise Bourgeois. H&W will use the 12,500 sq ft space for larger shows, much as it did in Coppermill, the Shoreditch building where it exhibited Christoph Büchel and Martin Creed. The new gallery will bring H&W’s count of exhibition spaces to five, with New York, Zurich and three in London (its small Swallow Street space will be abandoned). So: Gagosian, eight; H&W, five, so far. The FT will publish an interview with H&W president Iwan Wirth in its collecting supplement on February 27.
“Nowhereville, USA” is one unkind description of Bentonville, Arkansas, but the town (pop: 20,000) boasts the headquarters of the world’s largest retailer, Walmart. And next year it will see the opening of Crystal Bridges museum, a $50m extravaganza masterminded by Walmart heiress Alice Walton (the sixth-richest American, says Forbes), who has been avidly collecting American art for 20 years. Some of her acquisitions have been controversial, for example when she swooped on Asher Durand’s landscape “Kindred Spirits” (1849) in a sealed-bid deal worth about $35m, whisking it away from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Washington, who wanted to keep the painting in public ownership. And she has made a $30m deal with the financially troubled Fisk University in Tennessee over shared ownership of 101 works from the Alfred Stieglitz collection, donated to the university by his estate, subject to a pending appeal by the Georgia O’Keeffe museum.

Crystal Bridges’ latest acquisition is less controversial: Walton Ford’s “The Island”, acquired from New York dealer Paul Kasmin for a sum “well in excess of $600,000”, according to the gallery. It is on display at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin (until May 24) while waiting for the completion of its new home.

The Terre Offshore exhibition brings together the works of 11 artists from Reunion Island
You know from the moment you step in and see a metre-long work of art poised on bright red-striped plastic buckets — that you have entered the topsy-turvy world of artists. A word of advice for those who venture into this territory: leave all preconceptions of art outside the door. You won’t find place for them in here.
In India, as part of the Bonjour India Festival of France, the Terre Offshore exhibition curated by Francine Méoule brings together the works of 11 independent artists from Reunion Island. Four among them are here for the Chennai segment of the exhibition, giving us their take on the world through mixed mediums of contemporary art: from video installations to coloured inks on paper, and even adhesive on canvas.
A fragment of Europe
Try and pinpoint Reunion Island on the map, and you will be able to do just that. The miniscule speck of land to the East of Madagascar has the intriguing particularity of being a “fragment of Europe in the middle of the Indian Ocean”, and is as fascinating in its ethnic divergence as in its defiance of geographical norms. The once uninhabited island was occupied by the French in the mid-1600s, and was populated over the years by a mix of ethnicities. Its contemporary culture is rooted in African, Indian, Chinese, and French traditions, and its citizens are bound together by the shared Creole language. Such a crucible of cultures would form the classic breeding ground for art’s favourite musing, the agonising question of identity — or so we may expect.
Surprisingly, and yet refreshingly, the exhibition does not harp on issues of identity and on the continuous search thereof. It is certainly among the concerns of some, for as artist Jack Beng-Thi explains: “He who doesn’t know his history is always perturbed, and art has always been a means of expressing history”. But the younger generation of artists have different preoccupations. “Identity was largely questioned by artists of Reunion Island in the Seventies,” says Stefan Barniche. “I see myself as being in suspension, perhaps lost, but positively so, and have digested the question of identity. I deal with its more global aspect, its imprecision, its passages in form, and its continuous gliding, as reflected in my use of mixed mediums of art.”
Other artists simply draw from the contemporary world around them, and deal with direct, everyday observations. “I explore the relationship between colours, notions of disguise and revelation, and the interaction between living beings, in my work”, explains young artist, Gabrielle Manglou. “When the wind touches a leaf, there is life in that movement, and that is what I try and express through my drawings, sculptures, and videos.” There are others who examine the mechanics of space and time. Artist Yohann Quëland de Saint-Pern uses audio-visual displays to enquire into man’s relation to his geographical, physical, and mental surroundings. “I try and understand why we construct houses in one way in Reunion Island, in another way in France, and in a third way in India. My work is mainly concerned with geography, territories, and the body as the first interface with others.”
An array of ideas depicted through multiple forms, all challenging spectators to shed the preconceived ideas they might have of syncretic art, and interpret what they see before them through a fresh lens. As art critic Bernard Marcadé contends, Terre Offshore suggests “an extra-territorial dimension, a stage open to new adventures, and therefore, a platform to create new things”. A new experience of art is what you should come prepared for then — and you just might save yourself from tripping over the flat-screen TV lying on the floor, as you enter the exhibition.
The Terre Offshore-Reunion Island exhibition is on at Apparao Galleries until February 4. For details, call 28279803 or 28271477.

And never the twain shall meet…Investors and collectors»

Investors and collectors are different species. Which one of these are you?

For some time they had become interchangeable, the collector and investor in art, but as the market fragmented (when it was expected to consolidate), their domains have become exclusive of each other. The current environment is seen as buoyant for the collector as good quality works have returned to the market. For the investor, though, things look just a little grim, particularly since Forbes India’s damaging story on an art fund by Osian’s head Neville Tuli, it turns out, was artificially inflated before it bombed.

Here, then, are the differences between a collector and an investor. Read it with a pinch of salt.

COLLECTOR

# Is interested in particular works by an artist, or specific works of art.

# Would prefer the value of collected art to increase.

# Should the value of a painting or an artist move up, it’s fortuitous, a talking point in a group.

# Collecting is focused purely or loosely on a genre, period, medium, theme or specific artist(s).

# May occasionally sell works to enhance the perceived or academic value of a collection, or to turn around ill-chosen works.
# The collector is a constant visitor at galleries, artists’ openings, art fairs, talks and seminars.

# Collectors come as couples, are often women and only sometimes men. Institutions collect as well.

# Will invariably talk about art on social occasions — it’s a passion.

# Will likely beg, borrow or steal to buy a work they especially like.

# Collateral? “Well, I have this house…”

# If investments in art don’t rise, you won’t be entirely unhappy — there’s the art, at least, that you’d rather have.

# Unlikely to invest in an art fund: “I’d rather have the art.”

# Most likely to say: “Wow! That’s a treat. How much will it cost me?”

# Least likely to say: “I have too much art, I must get rid of some of it.”

# Will you look at that Souza!”

INVESTOR
# Has little or no interest in either an artist or specific works of art.

# Would definitely want the value of art in which he is invested to increase.

# The value of art must definitely move up, but it’s hardly a talking point.

# Collecting is driven purely by an index that factors in hedging of risks.

# Will definitely sell works as soon as the value is realised, as per a chalked-out strategy.

# The investor is rarely sighted at art events other than at talkathons about investment and value.

# Investors are more likely to be men (and sometimes women) from the financial world. Prefer institutional investing.

# Will never talk about art on social occasions — it’s just an investment.

# Will likely organise institutional funding for any purchase.

# The collateral is the art.

# If investments don’t rise, you’ll be anxious – owning the art is poor consolation and a reminder of your failure.

# Likely to invest in an art fund: “provided there is a guarantee of at least the principal and interest”.

# Most likely to say: “I don’t care who painted it, tell me how much it will fetch me three years from now.”

# Least likely to say: “I have too much money, I could buy art with some of it.”

# “Souza who?”

There hasn’t been anything of its sort in Chennai in nearly three decades. National Art Week, which concludes today, saw senior Indian  artists from across the country come together and four iconic cultural institutions — Lalit Kala Akademi, Kalakshetra, Cholamandal Artists’ Village and DakshinaChitra — join hands in a unique celebration of art.

“It was an attempt by the Lalit Kala Akademi to unite the different cultural and art institutions in the city,” said Rm. Palaniappan, regional secretary of the Lalit Kala Akademi. “Generally, we all tend to function separately, but this time everyone accepted the proposal without hesitation.”

From January 18 onwards, camps in print-making, sculpture, painting and ceramics were conducted at the four institutions, with the artists of each visiting one another at the different locations and interacting with young, up-and-coming artistes of the city as well.

“Most of us work in the isolation of our studios, so this sort of opportunity to interact not only with artists in our own field but from others too was fantastic,” says Manisha Bhattacharya from New Delhi, who participated in the ceramic camp at Lalit Kala. “To suddenly be part of camps with artists I had grown up idolising, such as K. Laxma Goud or Dakshinamoorthy, was an honour.”

For Akhilesh, the renowned indian  painter from Bhopal, it was almost like an “exchange programme.” “It was a chance to see, discuss our personal ways of looking at art, and learn from the way others work,” says the senior artist who was part of the painting camp conducted at DakshinaChitra. “I was particularly keen to look at the work of young artists in the city, and visited the group at Lalit Kala. What was interesting was the independence of their identity and the diversity of their expression, in spite of working together.”

This year also saw the Lalit Kala Akademi’s private collection of artworks from five years of camps and workshops in the region on display at their premises. The exhibition, concluding today, features a gorgeous collection of paintings, ceramics, sculptures and graphics in a variety of styles reflective of different regional schools and the artists’ own personal visions. A brilliant mix of colours, textures and media, this collection truly serves as a compendium of creativity for the region.

Looking ahead, Lalit Kala Akademi hopes to make National Art Week an annual event, not only in Chennai but in other cities as well, as a nationwide celebration of art and creativity. “In addition, we want to extend the format to include the city’s art galleries and the corporations that support art, and add symposiums, curated exhibitions and retrospectives of senior artists to the roster of events,” says Palaniappan.

Top 10 artists for the next decade

MF Husain

The Indian master is unparalleled in his artistic depth, breadth and output. Husain is where most collections begin and end. The decade ahead will only further cement his status as an artistic leader in India and an ambassador for Indian art throughout the world.

FN Souza (1924-2002)

As the founder of the Progressive Artist Group, Souza was the intellectual fount that brought diverse artists ranging from Husain to Raza together to create a new vanguard for Indian art. The artist and his works are very much the embodiment of passion, as alternately a bon vivant or an enfant terrible, who was obsessed with women, nature and religion. There is so much still left to discover about Souza whose operatic life could influence future artists and writers for generations.

VS Gaitonde (1924-2001)

With so few works readily available from a lifetime of solitary painting endeavour, Gaitonde may not be as well known as his contemporaries but amongst the cognoscenti, he is considered a sublime master whose style cannot be replicated. There is no one else that has the ability to render fire, air and mist from ether into two dimensions. While I would be curious to analyse his work scientifically to see what gives his painting its characteristic luminescent glow, I also very much enjoy the simple pleasures of sitting in front of my work in quiet contemplation.

Manjit Bawa

He may be better known for his charming works that juxtapose bold colour planes with whimsical figures and animals that continue to grow in popularity but there is another side of Bawa’s works that appeal to me. He is capable of extremely fine draughtsmanship and powerful imagery that has a socio-political bent. Though under the radar at the moment, more attention is being paid to his entire body of work following his recent passing.

Atul Dodiya

He is one of the most talented, perfectionist and intellectual painters of our time. He bridges the generations from the Progressives to the youngest artists coming out of art school today, the latter of whom owe him a stylistic debt as one of the first artists bring a post-modern aesthetic into Indian art. While his style is mercurial, his works always surprise. Atul Dodiya will grow in greater esteem as the decade continues.

Tyeb Mehta

I envision that within the next decade the curatorial and collecting demand for Tyeb Mehta’s work will increase exponentially now that he has unfortunately passed on. His meticulously rendered paintings are homages to the downtrodden of our society. In contrast to these works, with his series of Hindu goddesses, he exhibits a deep understanding of classical Indian texts and philosophies that one does not see too often in current contemporary art practices.

Arpita Singh

Like the artist herself who maintains a demure façade, Arpita Singh’s works with their pastel candy colours look benign. But that is only until one sees more closely the strong subject matter and violent brushstrokes that give her works a raw intensity in an otherwise domestic or feminine scene. As a successful artist working in a male-dominated field, she inspires legions of followers and students for being a great painter in her own right.

Rameshwar Broota

One should say that Broota is almost sculptural in his highly individualised artistic technique of scraping layers and creating works by removing paint. Having a relatively small body of work will only makes his appeal stronger. In some of his early works which I have, I see humour and subversiveness in how he views society and its inequities. His recent works have philosophical underpinnings about nature, man, beast and universe that to me begin a visual dialogue about humankind and existence.

Jitish Kallat

As a young artist who has achieved much during a relatively short career, Jitish Kallat is extremely driven. I think many are drawn to his level of technical proficiency along with the urban themes that underlie his recent works. The sprawling city, its classes and underclasses in a jumbled explosion of line and colour are reflections of chaotic times in India where Jitish Kallat serves as a chronicler of the moment.

V Ramesh

A painters painter, V Ramesh’s works are rooted and he uses metaphorical allegory to emphasise the ides of importance of the Human Body. One of the art worlds’ better kept secrets!

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“Kalpana”, anIndian art exhibition of 29 digitally produced prints of well-known paintings of eminent Indian artistes representing human figure forms and created over a span of more than a century has opened in this Kazakhstan capital.

Starting with Jamini Roy, the exhibition also includes the works of Amrita Shergil, M F Husain, F N Souza and Krishen Khanna, as well as some of the more contemporary and current artistes like Anjolie Ela Menon, Manjit Bawa and Arpana Caur.

“The paintings display the vibrancy and dynamism of Indian art during the 20th century,” said a statement from the Indian Embassy here that has organised the exhibition.

“The exhibition represents an underlying emphathetical harmony in the aesthetic stimulus of Indian art and the seamless manner in which several artistic influences belonging to the traditional and modern styles have coalesced over the last century,” the statement added.

The exhibition was inaugurated on Tuesday by Indian Ambassador Ashok Sajjanhar at a glittering ceremony attended by a cross-section of lovers and admirers of Indian art and culture including members of the Kazakh parliament as well as several ambassadors from countries like Brazil, South Africa, Japan, Romania, Spain, Austria and Italy.Speaking on the occasion, Sajjanhar said that the exhibition “represents the completion of a productive and fruitful year of expansion in bilateral relations since the visit of President (Nursultan) Nazarbayev to India as the chief guest at our 60th Republic Day celebrations in January 2009.”

He pointed out that the last one year has seen significant deepening of engagement through several events organised by the Embassy like the India-Expo in Almaty in May 2009 and two grand gala concerts of Indian Classical Dances and Music in Astana and previous capital Almaty and in November 2009.

Several contracts and agreements to further enhance and promote bilateral economic and commercial cooperation have been signed between companies of the two countries during this period.

Sajjanhar also expressed the hope that the exhibition of paintings by 14 eminent artistes of India would further strengthen people-to-people contact and promote understanding and cooperation between India and Kazakhstan.