Dali’s ashtray in Mumbai

Parikh was duly despatched by her boss to the Byculla zoo. The elephant was needed to pay Salvador Dali, the Spanish surrealist painter, for an artefact he was designing, commissioned by a team of Air India executives, who met the painter in New York.

Dali’s design was sent to Limoges, a city in France, where 500 limited edition pieces were specially crafted in porcelain, for the airlines’ offices, and first-class passengers.

Over half a century later, the Dali ashtray is on display in Mumbai.

A baby elephant was eventually found at the Bangalore zoo and brought to Mumbai, where it was temporarily housed in the Byculla zoo, while Parikh and her team got the elephant’s travel papers in order. The last Parikh saw of the animal was when she helped load it into the cargo section of an Air India flight bound for Geneva, where it would be received and sent by overland transport to Dali’s village, Cadaques, in Spain, Parikh said.

For Dali, the payment of an elephant was not nearly as bizarre as it sounds.

Elephants had fascinated Dali for years. They appear as a recurring motif in his works, appearing to symbolise power and strength. Critics trace some of this influence to the Elephant and Obelisk statue designed by the famous seventeenth-century Italian architect and sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini

The elephants and swans in Dali’s Air India ashtray, first appeared in his 1937 painting titled Swans Reflecting Elephants. This canvas features swans that surreally transform into elephants as they stand against bare trees and a still pool of water, in reverse image reflection.

Dali and the baby Surus never took to one another. Or so the story goes. Perhaps the baby elephant, separated from its mother, and transported thousands of miles to an alien olive orchard in a village in Spain, was less charmed with the quality of Dali’s imagination than the rest of the world. Whatever the reasons, a few years later, Surus was sent away to Barcelona Zoo.

This story of art for an elephant has since been widely reported and caught popular imagination. And the ashtrays from the limited edition set of 500, scattered around the globe, are now heirlooms.

Was it worth it?

Parikh, now silver-haired and retired from Air India, was at the opening of the exhibition. She sat flanked by M F Hussain’s horses, in a cascading mural of movement, and a flaming V S Gaitonde in shades of copper and orange. The room filled up steadily with art lovers, curators and collectors, who waited for Meenakshi Lekhi, the Union minister of state for external affairs and culture, to inaugurate this art show.

Speaking at the inauguration, Lekhi wasn’t convinced it was. “When you hear the story of an elephant being exchanged for an ashtray, I feel that’s an expensive deal,” she said.

Interestingly, the airline routinely bartered tickets for art.

Artist Brinda Miller shared the story of how she received a ticket to New York in exchange for two of her paintings in 1985. At the time, the airline bought art directly from artists like S. H Raza and Laxman Shrestha paying sometimes in cash and sometimes with tickets. Its collection boasts of works by eminent artists from the Bombay Progressive Group, among others.

NGMA director Nazneen Banu recounted how the art endowment was handed over by Air India to the ministry earlier this year. The collection, housed in a heavily-guarded climate-controlled hall on the first floor of the 23-storey Air India building at Nariman Point, will soon be brought to the NGMA, where, at the moment, 200 objects are on display.