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Lot 55

 

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Ajit Gupta was born in 1923 and studied at the Art College in Delhi. He went to Europe in 1958 and continued his studies at the Central School of Art in London. He went to Berlin, Germany in 1967 where he lived and worked until his death in 2001. Gupta met Hartel during his time in Berlin and the present lot was acquired by him, directly from the artist. His work was shown at an exhibition titled Happy Season at the Galerie Baku Berlin in... Ajit Gupta was born in 1923 and studied at the Art College in Delhi. He went to Europe in 1958 and continued his studies at the Central School of Art in London. He went to Berlin, Germany in 1967 where he lived and worked until his death in 2001. Gupta met Hartel during his time in Berlin and the present lot was acquired by him, directly from the artist. His work was shown at an exhibition titled Happy Season at the Galerie Baku Berlin in 2015. Gupta was a member of the Society of Berlin Artists and an exhibition scheduled by them for December 2016 will include some of the artist's works.

Dr. Herbert Hartel (1921 - 2006)

In many ways, art historian Herbert Hartel was a pioneer in the field of Indian art, both in his home country of Germany, and in India. Born in 1921 in the small town of Hoyerswerda, Hartel fought in World War II until he was seriously wounded in 1941. A few years later, he began studying Indology with Professor Ernst Waldschmidt, a renowned specialist in Indian philosophy and archaeology. After earning a PhD in the subject in 1953, Hartel joined the Ethnological Museum in the then divided West Berlin as a curator for their collection of Indian Art. He spent the next ten years painstakingly restoring their collection of art and artefacts, which had been scattered across West Germany during the war.

During this decade, he was responsible for turning the Indian Art department into a separate and independent Museum of Indian Art, which was founded in 1963 with Hartel as its director. Two year later, he introduced and taught Indian Art as a new subject at the Free University of Berlin.

In the late 1950s, Hartel undertook an eight-month long expedition to India, where he interacted with leading specialists and Indian institutions of art and archaeology. This trip later led to his own field work in archaeology in India through the support of the Deutsche Arch??ologische Gesellschaft (German Archaeological Society). During a second expedition through India In 1960, Hartel took up the initiative to set up a bureau for the German Archaeological Society. With the express task of finding a site for excavation and getting permissions to establish a bureau, he zeroed in on a dilapidated fortress in the village of Sonkh in Mathura district of Uttar Pradesh. After crossing many bureaucratic hurdles, he began his work in earnest, with funding from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation). Subsequently, from 1966 to 1974, Hartel conducted eight successive campaigns with the help of nearly 200 local workers, which unearthed numerous archaeological finds. One of these excavations included parts of a red sandstone apsidal temple, or gajaprastha, which bore reliefs carved by artists of the Mathura school, during the reign of King Kanishka I of the Kushan Empire. Some of the unearthed finds have been exhibited in India and Germany at the Berlin Museum fur Indische Kunst, which he headed.

Hartel's interests extended to modern art as well. During his time in India, he met Modernists such as Biren De, M F Husain, Laxman Pai, and Satish Gujral, and built a collection of artworks that he bought directly from them. Some are part of the collection of the Museum of Asian Art in Berlin. The following five lots were part of Hartel's personal collection.

Hartel passed away in 2006, leaving behind a legacy of scholarship which includes the discovery and preservation of cultural heritage.

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