It was a poignant moment. I had come to see the exhibition of landscapes by that noted artist of Lucknow, Satish Chandra, sponsored by the Galerie Ganesha at the India Habitat Centre in Delhi. I hoped to meet him, when I saw a photograph of his on the table. He had died some time back and the exhibition was a tribute to him.
Satish, whose name is better known in Mumbai than Delhi perhaps, will be remembered as one of our best landscape painters of UP. He had the capacity of catching the feeling of endless space that the great Gangetic plain gives one, lying low over open skies, on the one hand, and the intimacy of the thorn brush forests on the other.
His paintings give one the feeling of sharing vast spaces with others while at the same time reserving a space for oneself in them. He was a reserved man of enormous integrity and courage. I remember how he had invited me to deliver the Radhakamal Mukherjee memorial lectures at Lucknow in the late nineties, for which I carried a number of original works from my collection to be shown in Lucknow, most of which had not been shown before.
The point this exhibition made out was the enormous scope secular anti colonial expression gave the contemporary artist in India. He could use its variety of visual impulses and cultural diversity to express feelings of the oppressed as the artist of the Empire never could.
This would, in turn, help our artists in becoming known the world over as never before, as the empires had collapsed and given place to newly independent states of which India was an important one.
This was disliked by a group of religious fundamentalists led by a former administrator still bent on purveying cheap bazaar images of gods and goddesses that have now found their way to becoming decorative imagery on vests and underwear in the West.
So they overthrew the Lalit Kala whose chairman Satish was. Their organisation, known more for disrupting exhibitions than its creative expression, is still in control of the Lalit Kala Akademi in Lucknow although the chairman has been removed.
The least the UP government can do in the memory of this sensitive, sincere and scrupulously honest artist is to get rid of these charlatans parading as creative artists and reopen a new chapter of the UP Lalit Kala wih an exhibition of the works of artists like Satish Chandra, RS Bisht, Ram Kumar, Manu Parekh and others who have celebrated the UP landscape to bring light to the gloom that had been imposed by pygmies of the art world on North India?s former cultural capital, Lucknow.
This is all the more necessary as it is evident also from the budget, with its stress on fiscal and speculative capital, that creating will pay the price for making gambling and quick gains more attractive than creative investment and long-term gains.
Already the effect of the budget is visible in the art market. Those intent on making quick gains are putting buying works on hold with a view to making quick profits on the stock exchange and then ploughing them into art. Of course, this will not affect the market adversely or for too long.
So, collectors would do well to use this slightly dull time to ensure they fill in the gaps in their collections for better times to come. Come they will. And the recent saffronart auction gives us a good indication of this.
The Saffronart online auction of March 1-2, though a pre-budget exercise, shows a good picture of what the profile of our art market is like. The average blue chip Indian contemporary art work ought to be above the Rs 10 lakh mark. Of the six works of MF Husain that were up for sale, five were above this mark, with the highest priced one being Rs 75.68 lakh. SH Raza had all five of his works up for sale going above the Rs 10 lakh mark, with the highest price being Rs 64,46,000 for a Bindu Panchtatva.
Five of the six works of FN Souza that were up for sale sold above the Rs 10 lakh mark, the highest price (Rs 45,40,800) being paid for his work, ?The Emperor.? Ram Kumar sold four of his six works up for sale above Rs 10 lakh, with the highest price being Rs 27.20 lakh approximately.
Two of the four works of Jehangir Sabavala sold above the Rs 10 lakh mark, with highest price being Rs 31.8 lakh approximately. Akbar Padamsee had five works up for sale, of which two sold above the Rs 10 lakh mark, the highest price paid being Rs 43.12 lakh.
KG Subramanyan sold at a peak of Rs 18.95 lakh; Krishen Khanna at Rs 36.52 lakh and J Swaminathan at Rs 26.96 lakh.
In terms of US dollars, the range of the best works would work out to anything between $62000 and $1,75,000. Indian contemporary art, which once found it difficult to cross the $10000 mark in the US and European markets, has crossed the $2,00,000 mark today.
There is no doubt that it has proved to be very good investment indeed, despite the share-market, real estate and precious metals being competitors. Indian contemporary art still gives one of the best returns on investment today and as such continues to be a fruitful avenue for the serious investor.