India?s elite, despite the writing on the global wall, seems to lack the self-confidence our entry into global markets requires. In the art market, one sign of this is the description of our art market as ?over-heated.? Our contemporary art was selling at prices that were a fifth to a sixth of what it was worth. Today it sells at a third to a half of that. So what is overheated about it?
Indeed, there is no reason for the purveyors of panic to sound the alarm bells other than the failure of euro-American art to take over either our art tastes or that of the NRIs the world over. This should be reason to celebrate and not carp over. Indeed, the recent exhibition of Jehangir Sabavala at the NGMA, and the forthcoming one of Satish Gujral, not to speak of those of Sanjay Bhattacharya, Surendran Nayar and Gopikrishna, in early January itself, reflect a healthy development scanning decades.
When we look at the artists who sold at over Rs 1 crore at the end of last year, we find that they have a remarkably consistent track record of over half a century. MF Husain won the National Award with his painting Zameen in 1955. A figurative work of Ram Kumar, Sad Town first won the award in 1957. Akbar Padamsee won the award in 1961. Tyeb Mehta won it in 1965. Only FN Souza and S H Raza do not figure in these lists as they lived abroad in this period. So what the buyer pays for is a good 50 years of experience with their works and that is what commands a price. So there is no reason to imagine that the market is over-heated or the works over-priced The process of globalisation was understood and utilised by our art fraternity to their advantage. That is all.
There is every sign that other artists in the same age-bracket and of the same quality are also likely to find their prices soaring. Among these, one can list Satish Gujral, Krishen Khanna, K G Subramanyan, K K Hebbar,
K S Kulkarni, Shanti Dave, Sunil Das, Avinash Chandra, N S Bendre, Bimal Dasgupta, G R Santosh, A P Santhanaraj, Somnath Hore, Redappa Naidu, Ghulam Mohammed Sheikh, Bal Chabda, J Sultan Ali, Ambadas, Prokash Karmakar, Sohan Qadri, A Ramachandran and K C S Paniker. These are all award winners of the fifties and sixties.
The list is wide-ranging both in terms of style and in terms of places of origin. Among the figurative artists, they range from the realistic to the expressionist, while Hebbar, Ram Kumar, Shanti Dave, Paniker, Somnath Hore, Bimal Dasgupta and Santosh moved away from the figurative to the abstract, though like Padamsee, they often chose to tread the border between the two. Ambadas and Qadir remain abstractionists to this day, exploring their approaches systematically. What this list of artists reveals is ongoing resilience based on integrity and an individual quest for one’s own expression of the common reality we live in.
Both artistic integrity and continuity are important for art to be considered an inestment. Geographically they range from Kashmir to Kerala, Punjab and Gujarat to Bengal and Andhra, underlining the truth that the range we see in 2006 had already established itself in the sixties when an integrated contemporary Indian art had emerged with a republic that was independent and united by its concern for the common man. Its planning process and zamindari abolition indiciate this. And its peasant orientation has served or agriculture and our contemporary art well. Indeed, it is this rootedness in rural India that modernises without marginalising the people that gives our contemporary life and art its flavour.
Those who would corporatise it would do better to check their short-sighted input-output return for broader losses that we may have to sustain in the fields of art, culture and social harmony as a result of corporatisation of agriculture. Then the gains we foresee may not be as glowing as we think they are. Rural modernisation that gives people their due gives our art the special place it has in the world today. Ignore it and we do so to our peril. India is everywhere not only to sell itself. It has had a social vision that was creative from the ground up. Give that up and we damage ourselves as worth investing in more senses that we think.