Olaf Van Cleef à Kolkata - India

The Telegraph

Calcutta

Monday ,

January 31,2005






The bejewelled art of painting Culture shock Calcutta

- Cartier’s biggie ready to exhibit watercolours in Chennai gallery

by SOUMITRA DAS

Olaf van Cleef: A new birthday.

A box of paints, brushes, ink bottles, felt-tip pens, and a dish with a blob of white on it are laid out on a table in the hotel suite. The paper is thick, creamy and heavy as linen. Olaf van Cleef dunks a brush into one of the three tooth glasses filled with water and bathes the paper surface with it.

Next, with a paintbrush loaded with blue, he executes two strokes on the wet surface. They get blurred. He repeats the act with black pigment, into which carbon has been ground. The black strokes turn into bristly caterpillars. He obsessively dabs pinpricks of paint and ink till the surface turns into a minefield of reds, yellows and greens and black forms set with diamonds.

As a Cartier biggie, Olaf is more used to handling gems and jewellery. But for the past five years or so, he has been painting, sometimes through the night, like a man possessed. Thereby, he has created a body of work large enough to be exhibited. “After 20 years in the jewellery business, I wanted to do something for myself. It was like a new birthday. It needed a lot of precision and imagination. I know about mixing colours from my experience of handling flowers,” says Olaf, a qualified designer of gardens.

The man, whose name also connotes the other legendary jewellery house of Van Cleef & Arpels, is on his annual visit to Calcutta to get ready for an exhibition of his watercolours later this year in a gallery in Chennai. Why Chennai? “I could have easily done it in Paris. But I chose Chennai for I don’t go there. It is another world. Like entering a new life,” says Olaf, proud of his India link.

Olaf’s grandfather being Jewish, had taken refuge in the Taj of Mumbai between 1939 and ’44. He returned to Nice a trifle too early. He was arrested and sent to Auschwitz.

Olaf himself has been visiting Mumbai from age 14 with his grandmother, and his mind was packed with a “lot of detail” of pictures, statuary and images of beauties in saris.

Having read about a slummy Calcutta in Dominique Lapierre, he was in for a “shock” when he first visited the city in 1989.

“The Bengalis are warm. Delhi is babus. Bombay is Bollywood… flashy. In Calcutta, people open doors.” He asserts that even Paris has its slums that are overlooked. So people should not talk about Calcutta’s poverty alone.

He was overwhelmed by the colour and vegetation, and saw it as the capital of the Raj, the City of Palaces with beautiful art deco buildings.

“The Marble Palace is just one of them. The Deb family palace (Sovabajar Rajbati) is not even advertised. Not even in France do you see so many palaces with statues by the river,” he rhapsodises.

Olaf says his only role in jewellery designing is coming out with suggestions that are executed by others.

But his upbringing had predisposed him to art and culture. The artists he admires most are Miro and Dali, whose influence is easily recognisable in the black tapeworm-like creatures, squiggles and vortexes of his paintings.

Although he makes light of his own work — “always a joke” — but the passion with which he paints makes it more of a survival strategy for a man always living on the edge.

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