Art & Entertainment

Art For NRI's Sake

Indian paintings are raking in the big bucks at auctions abroad, but with unexpected results

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Art For NRI's Sake
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PAINT in India, sell in London. Or New York. That seems to be the way hundreds of contemporary Indian paintings have travelled over the past 12 months or so. The auction at Sotheby’s in London this month was only another, and certainly not the last. An auction by Sotheby’s in India in 1989 with The Times of India and then again in 1992 had spun more controversy than money. The recent auctions abroad have struck dollars, about a million an auction.

Suddenly, the art market has become busier outside India than within. Christie’s, the other big auction house in England, held its first auction of contemporary Indian art in London a year ago. That came shortly after an auction by Sotheby’s in New York from a collection by the American pair Chester and Davida Herwitz in New York. Sotheby’s auctioned another lot from the same collection in April this year in New York before the London auction last week.

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But international auction venues are no indication of the West finally waking up to Indian contemporary art. Few British or American buyers attended these auctions. Indian art isn’t going West,it’s going NRI. Non-Resident Indians packed the auction room at Sotheby’s which had to move in extra staff to handle 15 lines for telephone bidders. Over two hours of hectic bidding saw the auction of 156 works for £0.75 million (Rs 4.2 crore). At an average of Rs 2.7 lakh per canvas, a great deal more than average prices likely through sales in India. Earnings through Sotheby’s are in hard currency, which helps. More precisely, it’s art for NRI’s sake.

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All the paintings auctioned have not gone the NRI way. Some could have gone back to India through bids by agents of collectors in India, who bid strongly against one another for them. "A lot of these can turn up at auctions on a later date," said one buyer. They wait for the NRI who might pay more later. And for those that don’t the course is even more odd. An Indian may have to go to an auction in London to buy an Indian painting to bring back to India.

The most sought after paintings at the Sotheby’s auction were predictably the first eight by Raja Ravi Varma who painted in Bombay around the turn of the century. Bids began at about £5,000, which doubled and then trebled by the second. "Five..six.. seven...eight...’’ the auctioneer’s numbers rose, like the count of a teacher in a kindergarten class. The eight paintings sold for about a crore, more than five times what Sotheby’s had estimated.

There was a strong demand for the five paintings by George Keyt which have a Sinhalese stamp and a marked Hindu influence. Keyt painted in what was Ceylon, mostly in the 1920s. Works from the short-lived Progressive Artists Group, from Sri Lanka, Goa, artists from Bombay, the Bengal School, Paramjit Singh and a few works by Rabindranath Tagore and the Russian painter Nicholas Roerich briefly told a story of modern Indian art between them before they were separated once again by the fall of the hammer.

The M.F. Husain-Navalkar controversy hardly put the brakes on the canvases exchanging ownership. One of Raja Ravi Varma’s paintings depicts Menaka, bare-breasted but for a thin white veil tempting Vishvamitra. Another shows the temptation of Shuka by the apsara Rambha, just as lightly clothed. "These apsaras are meant to tempt, so it’s all right," said a Gujarati buyer at the auction. But Saraswati he would have liked seated on a lotus with the veena in one hand, book in the other.

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Surprisingly, Husain’s paintings did not fetch the expected prices. The star painting of the auction, Holy Mother, was expected to sell for up to £60,000 (Rs 33 lakh). It went for a little more than half that. Of the 17 paintings by Husain on auction, only one, a folio of five cut-out scenes from Indian epics sold for more than the estimated price. Expected to fetch up to £5,000, it sold for £11,000 (Rs 6 lakh). Tendulkar and Madhuri, his most talked about work at the auction sold for a little more than that, belying hopes of raking in twice as much. Two of his Madhuri paintings, Madhuri as Radha and Madhuri as Yashoda, fetched half of what had been anticipated.

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"It went very well, the auction was a success,’’ Husain said later. He brushed aside talk of his own paintings. Indian art was in demand, and that was good enough, he said. As the father of contemporary Indian painting, however troubled, he decided to take the larger view. Understandably so, for it can be dangerous to judge art by what an NRI or a dealer is willing to pay. In the world of art Husain is a great and prolific painter. In the art mart that can translate as an excess of supply and prices lower than estimated. It’s not unusual to have ‘a Husain—there are about 50,000 of them. Given that, a Husain painting still trades well.

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"I wanted a Souza or a Jamini Roy,’’ said an Indian accountant at the auction. It could have been any, she said. Why? "Well, there’s a good market for both and it will probably pick up in the future. ’’ Jamini Roy’s paintings sold for twice to five times the expected price. Six of his paintings sold for about £50,000 (Rs 27.5 lakh). Other than Jamini Roy, Ganesh Pyne—whose The Encounter went for £16,100 (Rs 8.8 lakh)—Shyamal Dutta Roy, Jogen Chowdhury and Bikash Bhattacharjee also sold well. Many of Souza’s works sold for as high as £3,000 (Rs 1.6 lakh) each.

That reading of what a painting is worth today, what it might be worth later was a little more subtle than just buying a name. Two paintings by Tagore sold for £16,000 (Rs 8.8 lakh) and £2,300 (Rs 1.2 lakh), only a little higher than anticipated. Two of the three paintings by Roerich got only half their expected prices of about £8,000 (Rs 4.4 lakh). Much more was paid for lesser known names.

The paintings bought will probably move on through more auctions. A Husain is safe investment, the blue chip in contemporary art business. The next step after buying a Husain is how often you change your Husains. There’s money in that change. "It’s an investment,’’ said an executive with a German firm in Bombay. "These auctions are going to be a part of the calendar now, you could end up making a neat packet on an artist who is in. ’’ A painting is only a more interesting looking share traded globally. The killings are in buying a lesser known artist cheap and waiting for him to get famous. That’s how many of the paintings got to the auction. Sotheby’s does not usually say who was selling the paintings. But "the majority of the works in the sale have been gathered from collections in England, Europe, North America and India itself," says Patrick Bowring, specialist in charge of the sale. Contemporary Indian paintings are increasingly finding their way to auction houses and through them to NRI buyers. The prices are magnetic. Buyers believe that many more Indian artists will now be looking over their palettes towards the auction market abroad.

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