Saffronart.com?s latest online auction reflects what we have been stating all along. At least 100% buoyancy is still possible in the price structure of our good contemporary art. The May 11 auction closed at Rs 57 crore ($ 13 million) after a sale of 150 paintings, drawings and sculpture of 41 post-Independence artists. It is interesting that 500 bidders from 20 countries took part in the auction .
The average price per work was roughly Rs 37.40 lakh ($87,000) in May, when in December 2005 it worked out to roughly Rs 27 lakh per work ($62,000), representing a jump of 38.5% between during the period.
Now, on this basis, what is strictly bluechip art today? This year?s blue chip art is on an average priced at above Rs 2 crore (nearly $4,50,000) per work. The works in this auction that qualify for this description are led by a 1961 work of F N Souza, which was on the cover of Edward Mullins? book on the artist in 1962. This work (lot 84) sold at about Rs 2.96 crore ($6,87,500). Souza is followed closely by Tyeb Mehta?s work of 1963 (lot 87) that sold at Rs 2.67 crore ($6,21,610). The theme of the work is a buffalo at the slaughterhouse, with the victim as the hero. This is a perennial theme also in the works of Jamini Roy, Souza and Krishen Khanna (Christ series) as well. In fact, Khanna?s oil on canvas of the Doubting Thomas theme (lot 66) sold at Rs 88.11 lakh ($2,04,907), which is a record price for the artist.
Another artist whose work scored a record high was M F Husain. It was his Holi theme, an oil on canvas (lot 77), which sold at Rs 2,65 crore ($6,16,000). Here we see the contemporary treatment of the myths and legends of the ?dark hero of the Yadavas? (as historian D D Kosambi called him), Krishna, in the spirit of the Pahari miniatures and existing folk styles blended with modernist and pop-art aesthetics.
Finally we have Akbar Padamsee, whose oil on canvas Metascape of 2005 (lot 67) sold at Rs 2,65 crore ($6,16,000), bringing Indian contemporary non-figurative art to the fore. Beyond these, we had two works of Raza, a Jogen Choudhury and a Ram Kumar as well as two more Souzas in the range of Rs 1 crore to Rs 2 crore. Souza was clearly the star of the show with three works of his figuring in the top-10 list. As a founder of the Progressive Artists Group of Mumbai and the most radical of our contemporary artists, it is not surprising that he soars above the rest. Raza, Husain, Padamsee and Mehta belonged to the group at different periods, so one can say that the Mumbai group is the most marketable today.
Once more, the commanding heights of this auction show us that it is the radical and independent art of our national movement that made a break from the tradition of colonial art that represented episodes from our epics in fanciful Victorian imagery as Indian art, by seeking inspiration from the folk styles of our anti-imperialist peasantry and tribal people and also in the anti-imperialist art of painters like Picasso in Europe and like those of the Nihonga (swadeshi) school of Japan.
It is significant that it is precisely these trends that are visible in the four works that enter in the blue chip list, with Padamsee?s Metascape representing the East Asian idealised landscape aesthetics presented in a contemporary idiom.
Indeed it is this contemporary radicalism that frightens our fundamentalist of all hues: Hindu, Muslim and Christian. All of them are afraid that people will enter territory yet uncharted by them and carry the essence of their message beyond them, leaving them behind. But that is what is happening in art today.
So we can expect more complaints and higher prices for the works complained about, which is not a bad thing after all.
