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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  Amin Jaffer: The segue artist
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Amin Jaffer: The segue artist

Traveller, curator, writer, sellerChristie's international director of Asian art moves among his many roles with ease and flair

Jaffer says he is proud that his job allows him to straddle two worlds: the museum and the auction house. Photo: Daniel Berehulak/Getty ImagesPremium
Jaffer says he is proud that his job allows him to straddle two worlds: the museum and the auction house. Photo: Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images

Amin Jaffer is, quite literally, a hard man to keep up with. Dressed in an impeccably tailored suit, scarf and overcoat, Jaffer is marching down the road to Franco’s café on London’s tony Jermyn Street. I half-jog to keep up, trying to speak and breathe at the same time. We’re making small talk about the projects we’re working on.

I tell him about this book I’ve just read on an Icelandic farmer who worked for the Danish East India Company in Tranquebar. “Ah yes, Jan Olofsson!" Jaffer says, still motoring along.

Jaffer, international director of Asian art at auction house Christie’s, is not one of those people you try to impress with random little pieces of trivia. He’s probably heard of it already. Unless, that is, he hasn’t already written about it in one of his fabulously produced books.

I had met Jaffer before, some three years ago, for a story on the luxurious lifestyles of India’s erstwhile royal families. That was a speedy, staccato affair. I read out a list of questions, and Jaffer fired off perfectly measured answers to each one.

But this time Jaffer appears more relaxed. There is a spring in his step as I catch up with him in the lobby of Christie’s office on King Street. The lobby is a hub of activity. Small crowds mill around. Some buyers, some browsers. “Let me show you around!" he chirps before bounding up a staircase two steps at a time. En route he pauses to chat with a South Asian, perhaps Indian, couple. “They are clients of mine!" he explains.

Illustration by Jayachandran/Mint
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Illustration by Jayachandran/Mint

Perhaps he owes this “client servicing" ability to his origins. Jaffer was born into an Indian-origin business family in Kigali, Rwanda. None of his family members were artists, he says, but he did grow up with a certain artistic sensibility. His family travelled a lot, especially around Europe, and Jaffer’s mother often gave him art books to read. By the age of 10, Jaffer says, he had seen most of the major museums in Europe.

“Growing up I wanted to become a writer," he recalls. “That was a dream lifestyle for me. Writing books for a living."

However, when Jaffer went to university, his main subjects included economics, commerce, political science, what he calls “straightforward stuff".

Like a good Indian boy Jaffer was expected to come back and join the family import business, though he half-hoped he could work in law or, perhaps, international relations. Art was nowhere in the picture: “I didn’t even think you could have a career in art. It didn’t seem possible."

And then in his first year at university in Canada, Jaffer enrolled for two electives: the history of French opera, and the French Renaissance chateaux. It was love at first sight. Jaffer told his mother that he wanted to study art. His mother agreed but suggested they leave Jaffer Senior out of the loop. Best to tell him after your degree, she suggested.

Jaffer completed his degree in the history of art and, in his final year, joined a course at the Royal Ontario Museum on the history of ceramics. As Jaffer sips on a cup of ginger tea—slices of raw ginger in hot water—he goes on a passionate verbal segue on ceramic glazes and finishes. “I really loved this analytical assessment of objects," Jaffer says.

Jaffer’s choice of words reveals much about his approach to art. He speaks and writes about it with an uncommon combination of analytical precision and aesthetic appreciation. The story also reveals his ability to immerse himself in things completely. Ceramics? Truly! French chateaux? Madly! Colonial furniture? Deeply!

Jaffer’s wardrobe is sharp and sober. Except for two little pieces of whimsy. The first is a wristwatch. It is a small, slim, vintage piece. From a time when men’s watches weren’t the refrigerator-sized monstrosities they have become today. “It is a Patek Philippe, Jaffer tells me. “I bought it on auction. The other is a little ring set with a blue stone that has an inscription in the Arabic script. Jaffer says it is from the 10th century. He has no idea what it says. But he doesn’t seem to care. “I feel it is a magical connection to the past.

“My interest at that time was French furniture," Jaffer explains, as he fishes out slices of ginger from his pot and pops them into his mouth.

Then came another career-defining moment. “The V&A had a new Indian gallery. And it had this spectacular ivory chair. Made in India and veneered in ivory. I was just amazed at its hybridity." Jaffer did his doctoral thesis on colonial furniture, and then wrote a definitive book on the subject. His first.

The subject, he says, also helped him understand his Indian heritage better. He was ethnically Indian but had never visited India. “In fact I didn’t even know that many Indian people."

“This furniture itself was like me. You see? It was not really Indian. It was not really Western. What was it?" Jaffer dived in.

Over the next dozen years Jaffer did several things for the V&A. He established linkages with international museums, worked on their collections and, perhaps most importantly, organized key exhibitions. The overarching intellectual goal, says Jaffer, was to bridge the gap between Europe and Asia. And make the historical relationships and artistic linkages more clear and understandable. “I wanted to overturn popular notions of… Orientalism."

Jaffer’s second book, and the book that changed his career, was Made For Maharajas, a rich, readable overview of the luxury products made for Indian royalty. “The book had great appeal to both academics and collectors. A lot of Indians who love luxury snapped it up."

And luckily for Jaffer the book came out in 2004, just as the Indian luxury market was poised to explode. Since then he has closely tracked the Indian market. “It is a market that matured very quickly," he says. On 11 December, Christie’s held a major sale in Mumbai featuring 80 lots, including works by F.N. Souza and Tyeb Mehta, and a pocketbook that once belonged to Rabindranath Tagore. Jaffer sounded optimistic about the sale.

I ask Jaffer if the Indian art market has recovered fully from the bust and disillusionment that followed the boom in the early 2000s, when anything Subodh Gupta merely breathed on sold for buckets of cash. “It has. So many people ask me about this bust. But if you look at the data, all the record-breaking Indian sales have happened after the Lehman crash."

In 2007, Jaffer moved from the V&A to auction house Christie’s. He had gone from being an academic civil servant—V&A is a public sector organization—to becoming someone who worked on developing and tracking markets and clients. Like every other segue in Jaffer’s career, this one too was executed smoothly. Jaffer loves his job.

The element of his work that Jaffer is most proud of is his ability to straddle two worlds: those of the museum and the auction house. It is a conjunction that seems to work well for both Christie’s and Jaffer’s clients.

Jaffer says that as a workplace, the auction house provides something that museums never can: a quantifiable feedback loop. “In a museum perhaps you can measure the success of an exhibition by the number of visitors," explains Jaffer. But in an auction house, sales, client satisfaction and client retention are all much more solid metrics of success.

Jaffer’s latest project—book and all—is a collection of Indian royal jewellery for a collector in West Asia. His book on this collection, Beyond Extravagance, has just gone into a second edition, and the collection has just gone on display at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

“My work is atypical," confesses Jaffer. It involves travelling, writing, curating, communicating, collaborating…and he seems to love every moment of it.

I point out to Jaffer that it has been seven years since he joined Christie’s. In the Amin Jaffer scheme of things, it would seem to be time for another unintuitive career segue. He assures me that he is completely happy at the auction house: “I have no plans at all for a radical change."

I wouldn’t bet money on that.

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Published: 13 Dec 2014, 12:48 AM IST
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