One view, many opinions

I was at the famous Salarjung museum in Hyderabad on a Sunday in November in 2018. It was my third visit to this great museum that ever casts an irresistible spell over my psyche with its wonderful repositories of well-preserved, amazing artistic things and artefacts of the Nizam era. Every time I visited the Salarjung museum, I would find something new and unique in this treasure-palace of marvelous beauty that invariably offers me immense pleasure and a memorable experience. This time too to attain the same kind of pleasant experience,I stepped into this eminent glorious museum . But what I encountered was absolutely different from my previous experiences.

Ambling along from one room to another room in the many-roomed museum, I was gazing at the artistic treasures and wondering at each one. While I was strolling along in the room where there was innumerable, wonderful paintings, depicting sceneries of nature, rural landscape, birds and animals, men and women, I saw a middle-aged couple standing before a huge painting of "a beautiful damsel". I was also standing before the same painting, gazing at it in great admiration for its spellbinding beauty. All of a sudden, I noticed the couple conversing about the painting. curiosity piqued, I lent an ear to their conversation.

"What a nasty painting it is", the wife burst out, looking at the painting. "What..... nasty? Where is the nastiness in this painting?" mumbled the husband, bewildered and shocked. "See the woman with no clothes on her body in the painting. Is it not so nasty and vulgar?" retorted the wife. 'You looked at the nakedness of the woman, not the beauty of this marvelous painting", muttered the husband, attempting to enlighten his spouse about the painting. "Where is the beauty in the obscenity of this painting?", argued the wife, refusing to be enlightened.

Dumb-found, still in a terrible shock, the husband stood looking at her. "It is shameful, standing further here and staring at this nasty painting. Let's move on quickly and look at other paintings", uttered the wife with a countenance contorted. Maybe, realising the futility of his efforts to convince and enlighten his wife about the artistic beauty of the painting, the poor husband strolled away from the painting of his admiration and of his spouse's hatred.

Maybe, the husband was a well-educated man with good artistic taste and his spouse was a semi-educated woman sans artistic proclivity. What I understood from this experience is that to appreciate a work of art, man needs a vision that is absolutely different from what he sees things around him. True artistic vision penetrates through the work of art beyond its surface and captures its artistic soul for the enjoyment of artistic work such as the painting. In the absence of such artistic vision, we can hardly derive pleasure from the work of art. After all, "A thing of beauty is a joy forever" as sung by the celebrated English romantic poet,John Keats.