Our art market is developing with the help of many hands. First, it is that deeply committed group of artists led by Ganganendranath, Rabindranath, Abanindranath Tagore and Jamini Roy, who differed on many points but were clear on one thing at least: that Indian contemporary art could not develop merely as a copy of British colonial art.
It is to their credit that they sought out artistic inspiration from a wide range of artists, like those of the Bauhaus group and radical German cartoonists and expressionists; the Nihonga group of artists from Japan; French artists like Cezanne, Matisse and Picasso, and finally our myriad folk and tribal art traditions. This search helped them become not only independent of colonial art school styles but also gave them an impetus to be original.
This originality and their radical anti-colonial stance gave a greater impetus to the Progressive Artists Group, which figured F N Souza and M F Husain among them. After Independence, they became the leading lights of contemporary Indian art. There is a Pan-Indian vision with groups of artists with a modernist perspective emerging in Mumbai, Kolkata, Srinagar, Chennai and Delhi, who command the highest prices in the market even today.
In the top bracket, we have the Tagore cousins, the leading lights of the Mum-bai group, and individuals like Ganesh Pyne, Sailoz Mookherjea, Ram Kumar, Akbar Padamsee, Rameshwar Broota, Vivan Sundaram and Anjolie Ela Menon. The second level of artists are those whose works range from Rs 1- 16 lakh or so, depending on the size. From Bengal, we have Somnath Hore, Ganesh Haloi, and Shuva Prasanna, to name a few. From Delhi we have Shanti Dave, Manjit Bawa, Arpana Caur, Krishen Khanna, Paresh Maity and Paramjeet Singh.
From Mumbai we have Atul Dodiya, Bal Chabda, Naina Dalal, Laxman Sreshta, Prabhakar Kolte, Jitish Kallat and Krishnamachari Bose. A new crop of artists is emerging in the South, as one can see from the considerable number of artists from Hyderabad, Kerala and Chennai. These include A Ramachandran, K G Subramanyan, B V Andani, Laxman Goud, T Vaikuntam, Valsan Kalleri, Nandagopal, Balasubramaniam, Murali Nagapuzha, Ramesh Gorjala, Babu Xavier, Shijo Jacob, Karl Antao, Akkitham Narayanan, Rinzon, Harsha, T V Santhosh and Jyothi Basu, whose work has been seen in different parts of the country recently.
It is evident that such a wide range of artists could not have emerged with the effort of a few practitioners. A large number of gallery owners too are behind these efforts. Among them, the Alkazis, Pundoles, Dhoomimals, Kumars, Vaziranis and Vadheras are notable.
Among the newer ones Siddharth Tagore, Sharon Apparao, Dolly Narang, Renu Modi, Payal Kapur, Sunaina Anand, Nevile Tuli and Ashish Ananad have done their bit to shore up and develop new outlets for younger artists, to publish monograph open artists and to document works and authenticate them.
The creation of this infrastructure has helped not only to inform the art buyer but has also made it more difficult for fakes to gain currency.
Finally, we have the buyers. Investors all over the country have helped to buy art and ensure that sales that were priced at one-fifth the worth of a work are at least three times the price today. Seven artists can be said to have crossed the Rs 1-crore mark.
But they could not have done so without the buyers, especially the NRIs who have ensured our galleries can carry our contemporary art to centres as far apart as Tokyo, London, New York and Hong Kong with the confidence and assurance that they will not face losses.
Indeed, it is these buyers who have ensured that a radical, independent and original contemporary expression become the hallmark of this art all over the world.
Without this bedrock of good taste our contemporary art too might have been relegated to anthropological museums and not found a space in galleries like the Tate and the Smithsonian as it does today. The effort is a common one, just as the history of our national movement was. That gives it its currency.
