Last month I wrote about the fruitful relationships that can develop between researchers at museums and auction houses like Christie’s. Of course, this is not always the case. But first – let’s talk about storage.
The way storage is currently set up at the Carlos, it is difficult for us to hang large quantities of framed works of art. Unframed two-dimensional works can be housed in a type of archival paper called glassine which can then be stacked and stored in archival boxes on shelves. In an effort to clear up space in our Works on Paper storage area this summer, we unframed a painting of the Hindu deity Narasimha (2021.2.2) so it could be put in a box with other Asian works. During unframing, we found the space between the backing board and the frame stuffed with what can only be called waste. Amongst the bits were pieces of printed newspaper. I couldn’t read the text, but I did make out a date: August 3, 1977.
I took pictures of the newspapers and sent them to Dr. Harshita Mruthinti Kamath at Emory’s Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies. If she could identify where the newspaper was from, this might tell us something about the provenance of the object. Dr. Kamath identified the name of the newspaper as Rajyadharma. The language is Kannada, which is mainly spoken in the state of Karnataka in southwestern India.
When we acquired the painting in 2021, it arrived with no explicit provenance information. The only clue was a copy of a text label in the file. When I typed the text into Google, I got a hit from the website of a gallery called Artisera in Bengaluru, India. This location fits with the newspaper, as Bengaluru is the largest city in Karnataka. I tried to contact the gallery back in 2021 and received an email back rather promptly asking me to give them a call to discuss the provenance. However, when I tried to schedule a call, I never received replies to my subsequent emails. The newspaper discovery this summer prompted me to try again. Still no reply…but they did put me on their mailing list!
