One of the five shows that are a part of the series Aesthetic Bind which marks the fiftieth anniversary of Mumbai’sGallery Chemould (now Chemould Prescott Road) is titled Cabinet Closet Wunderkammer. The German word, literally “wonder room”, is loosely used to imply a cabinet filled with geological, ethnographic or historical relics and curios. The show includes artists like Anant Joshi, the inaugural Škoda Prize-winning Mithu Sen and Atul Dodiya, one of the stars on Chemould’s roster, whose acclaimed 2011 show Bako Exists. Imagine, employed nine cabinets as receptacles of personal and political memory. The exhibition is the fourth in the sequence, but is perhaps closest to the Chemould story, no less than a curiosity cabinet itself with tales that spring at you from every crevice.

If the history of modern Indian art were a theatrical drama, Chemould would be one of its most significant protagonists. In 1941, the brothers Kekoo and Russy Gandhy started Chemical Moulding Manufacturing Company (the truncated version of which is Chemould) with Belgian businessman Roger Van Damme. While the younger Russy oversaw daily operations of the picture framing company, the late Kekoo and wife Khorshed focused on establishing Gallery Chemould inside Kala Ghoda’s Jehangir Art Gallery in 1963, with aid from the shop manager Roshan Kalapesi. Kekoo’s interest in art, however, predated the headiness and excitement of the’60s; it is a throwback to WWII, when Italian prisoners of war were housed at a barracks in Bandra. The prisoners, who went on to become the family’s friends, painted murals that were sent for display to other military outposts across the country.

“My parents [Kekoo and Khorshed], at any point in time, were looking at the current, at the contemporary moment,” said Shireen Gandhy, present director of the gallery and the fourthgeneration occupant of Bandra’s Kekee Manzil, named for her father. “Tyeb Mehta, for instance… They also did a major exhibition, Husain: 21 Years of Painting, in 1969. But they weren’t thinking about it that way.” The cast of characters that people the pages of The Perfect Frame: Presenting Modern Indian Art (2003) by Karin Zitzewitz, a biographical journey through the life and photographs of Kekoo Gandhy, reads like a celebrity roll call. Artists and stakeholders from the Indian art pantheon include, apart from Husain and Mehta, Rudolph von Leyden, KH Ara, Emmanuel Schlesinger, Bal Chhabda, Walter Langhammer, FN Souza, KK Hebbar and Mulk Raj Anand.

The author founded the critical quarterly Marg in 1946 and Gandhy was one of the first contributors with “a piece... on the proper way to frame pictures,” writes Zitzewitz. “He wrote, ‘The frame should enhance... the picture, without overpowering the subject. It should act as a sort of impresario, the picture always remaining the star performer, whether it be an original [Alessandro] Botticelli or [Paul] Gauguin print.’” In some ways, the Gandhys came to be the impresarios he writes about. Framing side, they were interested in every aspect of the field, simultaneously creating and cementing an incipient market.

“Going into the archives, I recently discovered some expenses in a file,” said Shireen. The Husain exhibition had cost Rs. 18,000 to put together, but an even more astonishing fact was unearthed. “The advisory group would send out letters to people seeking feedback on the exhibition. What are we going to gain from this exercise? In my opinion, that is the act of a true promoter.” Through the years, Kekoo would go on to be involved in stimulating and encouraging debate around art and cultural policies. As a refreshing, candid anecdote in The Perfect Frame recalls, he helped build the All India Association of Fine Arts (AIFACS), “a national forum for art” in 1946, when the All India Fine Arts and Crafts Society put forward a motion to be named the country’s representative body for art policy. Gandhy and his peers objected to the claim because “Far from being representative, they argued, AIFACS was completely dominated by Bengali residents in Delhi and Calcutta who aimed to promote Bengal School art over any other,” writes Zitzewitz.

Taking Indian art to the international stage was another avowed agenda. In recent years, Chemould has gone on to participate “through loan [and] collaboration” at major international exhibitions, including the massive Contemporary Art in Asia: Traditions/Tension (1997) that was simultaneously held across three venues in New York City, Private Mythology: Contemporary Art From India (1998) in Tokyo and Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis (2001) at the Tate Modern in London. But the progenitor of those exhibitions was the Lalit Kala Akademi-sponsored Art Now in India mounted at  London’s Royal Festival Hall (and later, at Ghent in Belgium) in 1965. The exhibition was curated by the English art critic George Butcher; the catalogue included a polemic by J Swaminathan. The success of this exhibition spurred a more ambitious venture – the Rotary exhibitions that toured the six European cities of Hamburg, Dusseldorf, Brussels, Zurich, Essen and Kronberg.

 Yet, it is on home turf that Chemould’s legacy occasions a celebration. “Geeta [Kapur, curator of the present series] didn’t want to do a retrospective,” said Shireen. “We felt that we had already done that [with the Fortieth anniversary exhibition].” Four decades of Indian art were laid out across the three tiers of the National Gallery of Modern Art in that lavish show, titled Crossing Generations: diVERGE. Kapur, with JNU art historian Chaitanya Sambrani, had then curated artists that included masters such as Mehta, SH Raza, VS Gaitonde, Gulammohammed Sheikh and Mehlli Gobhai, as well as contemporary leaders including Jitish Kallat, Surekha, Gargi Raina and Sharmila and Tushar Joag. Vivan Sundaram assembled “The Gallery Chemould Archive, 2003”, 12 blue velvet boxes displayed across a 15 foot table with archival material, such as invitation cards, catalogues, price lists and correspondence. “But we needed to fund that project, so we gave [the archives] away,” said Shireen.

Several artists will reappear in the present series of the shows, but the most significant one is the late Bhupen Khakhar, who is the “protagonist” of the inaugural show, Subject of Death. The exhibition serves as an homage and includes work borrowed from Khakhar’s estate, as well as (naturally) Anju Dodiya, Sudhir Patwardhan and Aditi Singh. “Bhupen’s language was about the quotidian… it was not about looking westwards,” said Shireen. “It opened the door to so many things: the freedom to talk about your neighbour or homosexuality.” Subject of Death, in the tenth year of Khakhar’s passing, is not only a testament to the academic and stylistic impression he made on artists that succeeded him, also a reminder of his friendship with the Gandhys. Khorshed Gandhy had spotted Khakhar’s talent, and in 2005, two years after his death, Chemould had mounted Bhupen Among Friends.

In another interview with Zitzewitz in the diVERGE catalogue, the elder Gandhy couple talked about a Khakhar show at the Cottage Industries Emporium in Delhi during the early 1970s. “I was crying,” said Kekoo. “…Bhupen had a figure of a man, with his penis exposed. No way would Bhupen relent… I finally told [him], I have no say in the matter, this is not my gallery, it is the Cottage Industries and they are not allowing this painting and I’m removing it and that’s that.” (In the same interview, the couple went on to warmly flesh out several other artist friends. At one point, Kekoo said about Jehangir Sabavala, “His goodwill went so much into my blood, that one day when I had an operation and was coming out of anaesthesia, I became Jehangir!” he said. “The family couldn’t understand! I was talking just like him!”)

The Khakhar show and the penultimate one from the series, Floating World, were the first to get fixed. The latter includes Reena Saini Kallat’s “Untitled (Map/Drawing)” exhibited at the Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art in 2011; as well as Hema Upadhyay’s “Loco Foco Motto”, matchstick chandeliers symbolising the Partition, developed at a Karachi residency; and Shakuntala Kulkarni’s cane sculptures that were displayed at Of Bodies, Armour and Cages at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya earlier this year.

Citizen Artist features Shilpa Gupta, Jitish Kallat, Camp’s Radia Tapes “script” (displayed at the Škoda Prize nominees exhibition earlier this year at Delhi’s NGMA), Raqs Media Collective and Rashid Rana’s provocative “Anatomy Lessons 3” that Mumbai viewers may remember from his April 2012 show. Chemould artists, and what Shireen dubs “guest appearances” by those represented by other galleries come together to complete the story. “[Geeta] really wanted Sudarshan [Shetty]’s ‘I Envy your Mortality’.” That artwork will not make an appearance in this series for a variety of reasons, but Shetty devised another installation along the same lines. The artist will also be a part of Phantomata, where the line-up includes LN Tallur, Tushar Joag’s tubelight saberbearing skeletal army and a Sonia Khurana video.

Kapur and Shireen have been going back and forth on the shows for nearly two years now. But it is clear that they bear the weight and command the heft of a 50-year-old legacy. “The shows include the practices of so many artists, so many crossovers,” said Shireen. “I am hopeful, it will become a book that will tell us what the gallery is about.”