Meet Kiran Nadar, the founder of India’s first private museum

To call Kiran Nadar an animating force behind India’s art market would be an understatement. An internationally ranked bridge player, Nadar brings a winner’s mindset to her collecting and has been known to chase a desired artwork for decades.

The founder of India’s first private museum, Nadar’s tastes are national yet expansive, from the moonlit 19^th-century vignettes by Raja Ravi Varma that grace her home to the politically challenging contemporary sculptures she chooses for the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, such as Line of Control, Subodh Gupta’s towering mushroom cloud made from kitchen utensils. She takes special delight in commissions from artists who eventually became friends, including M.F. Husain and Arpita Singh.

In 2010, when she established the KNMA in a shopping mall in Sakhet, Nadar hoped the commercial location would help draw incidental footfall. Instead, it has been the institution’s mounting of important retrospectives of the country’s greatest talents – especially heretofore under-known women artists – that has attracted eyeballs. Definitive exhibitions of the pioneering minimalist Nasreen Mohamedi and the intricate rope sculptures of Mrinalini Mukherjee toured to international venues in New York and Madrid.

Whether a work enters her home or the museum, Nadar ultimately views her collection as a public good. ‘We don’t charge, we have to be there for posterity,’ she says. And, although the pandemic has thrown a wrench in the schedule, she is looking forward to breaking ground on a new home for the KNMA, designed by Adjaye Associates. After all, she notes, ‘The Guggenheim started as a private endeavor, too.’