CHRISTIE'S, an auction house which hawks as many as 75 different categories of art and artifacts around the globe, registered a turnover of £1 billion last year. Indian contemporary art, one of the newest areas that the company has branched out into, accounted for only a minuscule fraction of that staggering amount—a paltry £1 million. For once, statistics reveal the true picture: Indian painters aren't exactly setting the Hudson on fire.
No room for illusions here. So there's no high-voltage buzz, no million dollar price tags, no sensational bids. But the colourscape is a shade brighter today than it has ever been in the past. Even as it exists on the periphery of the international market, Indian contemporary art, in the 50th year of the country's Independence, is inching ahead. Nothing spectacular; just steady, dainty little strokes. On May 8, Sotheby's, enthused no doubt by the success of its October 1996 auction of a slew of Husains and Pynes in New York, put 250-odd specimens of Indian modern art under the hammer in London to commemorate 50 years of Independence. On June 4, once again in London and for the same reason, Christie's will auction 233 paintings by 88 Indian artists. While the Sotheby's sale, which also featured a wide array of antiques, fetched nearly $3 million, the Christie's auction is expected to raise up to $1.5 million.
Certainly no threat to the Impressionist masters or to Picasso or Salvador Dali. At a recent Christie's auction in New York, a Paul Cezanne portrait of his wife fetched $23 million and a self-portrait by Edouard Manet was snapped up for $18.7 million. Mind-boggling figures that Bikash Bhattacharya's haunting female forms or Francis Newton Souza's rebellious strokes, leave alone the Raja Ravi Varmas, are unlikely to ever command.
But the going has never been better for Indian contemporary art on the world stage. Two major international auctions in less than a month dedicated exclusively to modern art from our part of the world: that's a sure sign that Indian contemporary art is on the move. As painter Gogi Saroj Pal said during Christie's impressive preview exhibition in New Delhi in early May: "It is good for art, for the country, for people who buy art."
"These auctions do promote and raise the price of Indian artists," says Jehangir Sabavala, whose oil on canvas, 'Pilgrimage II', will be on sale at the Christie's auction. However, Akbar Padamsee, whose 'Mirror-Image' is the largest painting on the Christie's catalogue for the upcoming auction and is estimated at $17,000-25,000 (over Rs 8 lakh), seems to have little faith in these exercises. "For us prestige is associated with whatever is western, which is why we place so much store by these auctions," he says. The prices that Indian artists get, he complains, are far too low. "An Indian painter is happy if he sells his work at Rs 5 lakh internationally, while a western artist's work might well be worth Rs 50 lakh. It shows how inexpensive, and hence cheap, Indian art is in the the international community," says Padamsee.
Dermot Chichester, chairman, Christie's South Kensington, is confident that Indian contemporary art will do well on a wider stage in the years ahead. "It has tremendous potential," he says. "There's enormous interest worldwide, so the market is growing." Sabavala feels it will take 15 to 20 years for Indian artists to reach truly international levels. "Nobody can expect something so new to be straightaway ranked too high. But these auctions will help by gradually promoting Indian art, by helping Indian artists establish their own prices internationally," says the Mumbai-based painter.
It is a new but steadily growing market that the two leading global auction houses are out to tap. "The modern and contemporary market is still young but already a canon is beginning to emerge," says Simon Taylor, senior director of Sotheby's,
London, who was in overall charge of the recent Indian sale. "There were substantial and sold prices for Chughtai, Husain, Anjolie Ela Menon and Ganesh Pyne." However, at the Sotheby's sale, it wasn't the paintings that dominated the show—the works of the likes of S.H. Raza and Manjit Bawa, surprisingly, remained unsold—but the antiques, nine of which made it to the list of top ten lots. A solitary painting, Abdur Rehman Chughtai's 'A Woman Holding a Lotus on a Terrace', which went for almost $45,000 (Rs 16 lakh), figured in the list. Yet, the overall showing wasn't bad at all. Many of the paintings fetched more than their pre-sale estimates. The larger canvases of Maqbool Fida Husain, the works of Ganesh Pyne and Anjolie Ela Menon, and a large black oil painting by Krishen Khanna, 'The Anatomy Lesson', held their own. 'The Anatomy Lesson', for instance, was expected to fetch Rs 5 lakh. Eventually, it went for Rs 8 lakh ($23,000).
Will the results of the two auctions impact the local art market in any significant way? "Auctions are not meant to boost the price of the artist's work, but to help the collector and buyer get a good deal," says Padamsee. Virendra Kumar Jain of Kumar Gallery, who has aided and observed modern Indian art since the days Husain sold his water colours for Rs 40 apiece, isn't sure either. "Indian artists are still struggling to make it really big. Their worth is nothing compared with the value of art in the West," says the veteran art collector. Leading artists like Husain, he says, sell primarily in the West and only among non-resident Indians at that. An auction or two might not influence the value of an artist in India, where buyers, including corporate investors, are forever looking for discounted rates.
