NEW DELHI.- From October 2024 to September 2025, three of India's most important museums for modern and contemporary art present the special exhibition “Eckart Muthesius and Manik Bagh: Pioneering Modernism in India“ curated by the head of the Museum für Asiatische Kunst. First, it will be on display at the Kiran Nadar Museum (KNMA) in New Delhi from 14 October to 8 December 2024, then at the Museum of Art and Photography (MAP) in Bangalore and finally at the Dr. Bhau Daji Lad City Museum in Mumbai. The exhibition will be on view at the Humboldt Forum in Berlin from the end of 2025.

To mark the 120th birthday of architect Eckart Muthesius, the exhibition tells the fascinating story of a fruitful dialogue between India and Germany in the field of design and architecture in the early 1930s.

The protagonists of this dialogue were Maharaja Yeshwant Rao Holkar II of Indore (1908-1961) and the Berlin architect Eckart Muthesius (1904- 1989), who met in Oxford at the end of the 1920s. Shortly afterwards, Muthesius was commissioned by the Maharaja to design a palace for him and his wife. This was to be clearly different from existing designs in the English colonial style.

The palace commissioned by Yeshwant Rao Holkar and realised by Muthesius in 1933 was India's first iconic modernist building: Manik Bagh (literally the ‘jewel garden’). The palace embodied the holistic ideals of the new democratic architecture. The puristically elegant yet highly innovative interior designed by Eckart Muthesius, the numerous masterpieces of contemporary design and important works of art - such as the sculpture ‘Bird in Space’ commissioned by the Maharaja from Constantin Brancusi in three versions - made Manik Bagh an architectural synthesis of the arts and a symbol of the dawn of international modernism like almost no other building in Asia. The contemporary press wrote euphorically of a ‘fairytale palace of modernity’.

The exhibition, curated by Raffael Dedo Gadebusch, head of the Museum für Asiatische Kunst of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, shows a selection of rare vintage photographs by Eckart Muthesius, Emil Leitner and Man Ray. These are complemented by little-known watercolours, drawings and design studies by Muthesius.

The exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue in English with essays by Raffael Dedo Gadebusch and Prahlad Bubbar, 158 pages, ISBN 978-3-88609-896-5, bookshop price: 24,95 €.