Selling art is a complex business. In essence, a work of art is part of the productive process. It is also a commodity as it is produced for sale. To that extent its marketing depends on the laws of supply and demand, on salesmanship, presentation and packaging. Indeed, everything that goes into an immediate sale holds good for selling art as well.
Beyond that, however, other factors enter into the appreciation of value of a work of art. These factors broadly reflect what we could call confidence in an investment. This comes from the assessment of the body of work an artist has created in a lifetime. If the works of a particular artist are properly documented then such an appreciation is possible. This task has begun for Indian contemporary art. Dr Euti Sen has documented SH Raza and Ganesh Pyne. Ram Kumar too has been documented, as has Krishen Khanna in a recent book by Gayatri Sinha. In the same way, catalogues and books provide documentation for MF Husain, Anjolie Ela Menon and Arpana Caur.
Documentation definitely helps in the sales of an artist much more than mere promotion. It allows an artist?s work to be seen as a body and then the buyer can place order for a particular work that he or she intends to buy in the totality of an artist?s production and judge it in relation to it. Well-documented artists? works are much easier to authenticate. So naturally, a buyer is prepared to pay more for a work where the area of doubt is less. Secondly, what increases the value of a work is a correct assessment of the place of an artist in the history of the development of a particular trend in art, or the art of a country, a region, or the world. The correctness of assessment is very important. Sometimes artists and art historians try to present history a little differently from what it is. That should not surprise one. Vested interests exist everywhere. But it is the job of the art historian to check out the truth. The reason for this is obvious. An incorrect approach may highlight a particular artist or set of artists for a while, but in the long run, it is bound to be found spurious and the works it set out to project will suffer from a fall in confidence which they do not deserve.
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| Bandmaster Banarasidasji, oil-on-canvas by Krishen Khanna |
Something of this is visible in Gayatri Sinha?s book, Krishen Khanna: A critical Biography. The book gives an impression that the short-lived Gallery 59 and the art section of Kunika Chemould folded up in the 1960s because of the lack of an art market, and that the Kumar Gallery ?filled the breach.? But does a gallery that started in 1955 and carried on beyond the mid-sixties be described as ?filling a breach??
It is curious that galleries that barely survived a couple of years are treated as seminal while one that persevered is treated as merely filling a gap. In fact, far from filling a gap, the Kumar Gallery gave confidence to contemporary art of its time. Not only professional artists such as Krishen Khanna, Ram Kumar, Tyeb Mehta, MF Husain and Santosh, but also many others in this crucial period played an important role in projecting Indian art abroad, as in the case of helping to curate work for the German exhibition, ?Contemporary Art from India,? that was shown in Germany in 1959. Also, being in Delhi, the gallery was able to sell Indian art to foreign clients such as Arthur von Bohlen, John D Rockefeller, Kingsley Martin, Aldous Huxley, Andre Malraux, Hugh Gaitskell, Octavio Paz, Robert Mac Namara, Count Alian de Rothschild, Arthur Koestler, Sir John Reed, Chester Herwitz, Kito de Boer, and Anthony Quinn, and to Indian buyers such as Homi Bhabha, HC Mahindra, PRS Oberoi, Sir Cowasjee Jehangir, Lady Jamsetjee Jejibhoy, Piloo Mody, Lady Ranu Mukherjee, Naveen Patnaik, Satyajit Ray and Jehangir Nicholson, to name only a few.
So, the Kumar Gallery was neither a stop-gap nor, as the book would have us believe, a flash in the pan that drifted into oblivion with Virendra Kumar taking to spiritualism. On the contrary, it was a gallery able to attract Mumbai artists such as Husain, Souza, Tyeb Mehta and others to Delhi; and in their wake gallery-owners such as Kekoo Ghandi, who were unable to complete and returned to Mumbai. Kumar, however, persevered and grew.
With him, many of the contemporary artists grew as well. In fact, not a few of those who went abroad, owe their fame to the Kumar Gallery and other Indian galleries, such as FN Souza, Krishna Reddy, Ram Kumar, Akbar Padamsee and SH Raza. Those who chose to ignore Indian patronage and galleries, such as Roop Krishna, were never heard of again. The fact is that Indian galleries that have persevered, and Delhi galleries with a past have contributed greatly to the stature Indian contemporary art has today. To deny that and latch on to birds of passage that survived only for a year or two is to do a grave in justice to Indian gallery-owners who took risks, supported artists and sold their works successfully when they most needed such support. Also to highlight Mumbai and denigrate Delhi at a period when India had its most independent policies is to obscure the powerful influence our independence movement had on our art, gifting it with irreverence, radicalism and originality. The Mumbai group, far less radical than Bengal artists such as Rabindranath and Gaganendranath Tagore, or Ram Kinkar Baij, Somenath Hore and Paritosh Sen, has successfully managed to market itself to the detriment of better artists.
What we need is a broader, more inclusive vision, today and not a narrower one. And this vision cannot be realised without standing up to those threatening it. And step by step, to present Indian art without chips on the shoulder.