Valuations continue to push higher, with Amrita Sher-Gil and S H Raza leading the way
Amrita Sher-Gil’s 1937 painting The Story Teller is now the most expensive work of Indian art ever sold. The painting realized a hammer price of $7,445,783 on September 16, 2023, at Saffronart’s Evening Sale in New Delhi. The record-breaking winning bid comes less than a month after Sayed Haider Raza’s 1989 canvas Gestation had itself briefly become the highest-selling Indian painting of all-time. Gestation was purchased at Pundole’s Fine Art Sale in Mumbai for $6,270,000 on August 31, 2023. The stellar auction results over the past month extend a two-decades long bull market in blue chip Indian art and suggest a degree of immunity in India from corrections in international art markets.
A second century of Raza
S H Raza is one of India’s most recognizable artists and his profile has raised to an even higher level after a monographic retrospective of his work at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in the first half of 2023. The retrospective entitled S H Raza (1922-2016) was curated by Catherine David and Diane Tourbet to mark the centenary of his birth and it included over 90 of his works spanning a sixty-year period.
Sayed Haider Raza, Gestation (1989), Acrylic on canvas. Photo: Pundole’s
Raza was one of the founding members of the Bombay Progressive Artist’s Group in 1947. In 1950, Raza left for France, where he spent the majority of his life before moving back to India after the passing of his wife and artistic collaborator, the French artist Janine Mongillat, in the early 2000s. In a 2023 exhibition at 1×1 Art Gallery in Dubai entitled A Life Loving & Working (1953 – 2002) – Janine Mongillat & S H Raza, Pompidou curator David placed their works side by side to emphasize how their relationship impacted their respective artistic outputs.
The Bindu figured prominently in both the Pompidou and 1×1 exhibits. When Raza had come up against a creative impasse in the 1970s, a return to Indian mysticism reinvigorated his practice. Raza abandoned his modernist approach to landscape painting and chose to explore the significance of the Bindu, the metaphysical black dot which appears with frequency across his oeuvre beginning in the 1980s.
The turn in Raza’s career to a highly abstract geometrical style of painting had become an emblem of Indian modern and contemporary art and has led to many of the category’s best-ever auction results. In 2010, Raza’s 1983 painting Saurashtra became the highest-selling Indian painting when it was auctioned at Christie’s for $3,511,875. Raza has now held this record at two points in his career after the August 2023 auction result of Gestation.
Sher-Gil reclaims records
Amrita Sher-Gil is one of India’s most beloved artists who is heralded as an early champion of women’s and rural people’s issues. Born in Hungary in 1913, Sher-Gil was trained in Paris at the École des Beaux-Arts where she was steeped in European modernism. Sher-Gil was a precocious talent and her painting Young Girls from 1932, which she painted at the age of 19, won her a gold medal and membership in the Grand Salon of Paris.
Sher-Gil, Young girls, source: Google Art & Culture
Amrita Sher-Gil, The story teller (1937), Oil on canvas. Photo: Saffronart
Sher-Gil died in Lahore at the age of 28, just days before her first major exhibition. Although her work never received widespread recognition during her lifetime, Sher-Gil was designated a National Art Treasure in 1976 and is now India’s most commercially successful artist. The Story Teller is an oil on canvas depiction of a group of women in a village setting, listening attentively to a storyteller who is seated on a charpai (a traditional woven bed). The painting is influenced by Pahari miniature paintings and is one of the twelve works that Sher-Gil selected as her most important.
Prior to setting Indian art’s all-time auction record with The Story Teller in 2023, Sher-Gil had posted a number of outstanding auction performances and cemented her reputation as one of the nation’s most coveted artists. In 2021, her 1938 painting In the Ladies’ Enclosure sold for $5,072,153 at Saffronart’s Summer Auction to become the second highest-selling Indian artwork after Vasudeo S. Gaitonde’s 1961 painting Untitled which had realized a price of $5,499,466 earlier that year.
Sher-Gil, In the ladies’s enclosure, source: DNA
Vasudeo S. Gaitonde, Untitled, source: SAFFRONART
Continued appeal for Souza and Mehta
Francis Newton Souza and Tyeb Mehta also performed well at the Saffronart and Pundole’s auctions where Amrita Sher-Gil and S H Raza achieved their historic auction results. Multiple Souza lots were included the Pundole’s sale, including his painting Hunger from the early 1960s which sold for $3,627,443, exclusive of buyer’s premium, against a high estimate of $ 2,176,466. The painting depicts a crying childlike figure, nude and abandoned, painted in Souza’s grotesque cubist style.
Francis Newton Souza, Hunger (early 1960s),
Poly-vinyl acetate and oil on canvas.
Photo: Pundole’s
Francis Newton Souza, Caribbean palm, source: Sotheby’s
Francis Newton Souza, Birth, source: DNA
Tyeb Mehta, Two heads (1985), bronze. Photo: Pundole’s
A bronze sculpture by Tyeb Mehta entitled Two Heads (1985) sold for $1,571,892, exclusive of buyer’s premium, against a high estimate of $604,574 at the Pundole’s Fine Art Sale. The sculpture’s indentations and conflictual positioning of two human heads evokes the violence and suffering at the core of the human condition. It was consigned by Japan’s Glenbarra Art Museum, a private institution founded by the longtime collector of South Asian art, Masanori Fukuoka.
A couple of weeks later at the Saffronart Evening Sale, Mehta’s haunting female portrait from the 1950s, Red Figure, sold within its estimate for $1,084,337. The results signify continued appetite at the upper end of the Indian art market for Mehta after his 1999 painting Untitled (Bull on Rickshaw) took its turn as the highest-selling Indian artwork of all time when it sold for $5,527,399 USD at Saffronart in April of 2022.
Tyeb Mehta, Untitled (Bull on rickshaw), source: artnet
Tyeb Mehta, Red Figure (circa 1950s), Oil on canvas,
Photo: Saffronart
If recent history is any indication of what is to come, this collection of five blue chip names – Sher-Gil, Raza, Gaitonde, Souza and Mehta – may very well continue to trade places in the limelight atop the list of Indian art sales records. With macroeconomic tailwinds behind the Indian economy and these master artists selling well below the $10 million mark, there is still plenty of room for growth.
Written by Adam Szymanski
Source: Mutual Art
