Delhi Art Gallery has acquired the 75-year-old Jamini Roy house in Kolkata to open India’s first Private Single-artist Museum. DAG has taken the acquisition of the historic home of India’s most loved modernist, National Treasure Artist Jamini Roy, for the express purpose of creating India’s first world-class private single-artist museum and cultural resource centre on the life, work and times of this pioneering artist.
India has a lacuna of professionally run private art museums and there are no professionally run single-artist museums in the country, a gap that DAG hopes to fill with the restoration of the 75-year-old historical house with the help of conservation architects and designers to open next year.
According to Ashish Anand, CEO and managing director of DAG, “This is the single-most important project undertaken by DAG in its three decades. For too long, art has been treated in this country like a tradeable commodity but we at DAG, as custodians of India’s largest collection of art, realise the responsibility we have in sharing our artists with a larger audience because art, we believe, is one of the greatest, most democratic of tools we have for understanding social and cultural milieus of times past. In dedicating the Jamini Roy House Museum to the nation, the people of Bengal and all art lovers, we are ensuring the participation of people from all walks of life in this exercise.”
