Riding the Elephant

Top painting record rises twice in two weeks to $7.45m

Provenance of known collectors and fresh-to-market make highest prices

Fresh records are being set for works by Indian modern artists, not just at top levels where a painting was sold on September 16 for a new auction high of $7.45m, but also at lower price points where India’s economic growth has increased the interest among art buyers.

The $7.45m beat a record figure of $6.27m set just two weeks earlier on August 31. Both results came at the latest live sales by the Mumbai-based market leaders Saffronart and Pundole’s. 

The records were achieved for works by two of the country’s leading 20th century artists, Amrita Sher-Gil and S.H.Raza.  

Pundole’s also produced a record total figure for a modern Indian art auction of £20.75m, slightly higher the $20.68m that Pundole’s hit in February last year.

These results confirm that the main focus for the auctions has moved from New York and London to India, with local firms displacing Christie’s that had an $11.02m auction in New York today (Sept 20) with some strong bidding for the best works. Sotheby’s has one in London next month. A smaller Mumbai auction house, AstaGuru, totalled £7.99m on-line sales on September 1-2.

“The Indian economy is very strong, and people have accumulated a lot of wealth that they are spending on real estate and other tangible assets so want to have the best works of art. That is in addition to established collectors who go for major works like the Amrita Sher-gil”  says Dinesh Vazirani, Saffronart’s co-founder and ceo.

The results underline the importance of provenance in a market where there is always the risk of buying fakes. Saffronart’s top lot by Amrita Sher-gil came from a Delhi family that was close to the artist and acquired the work directly. It also included 16 works that sold well from prominent London and Dubai-based collectors, Jane and Kito de Boer.

Pundole’s auction provenance came from it consisting entirely of works from Masanori Fukuoka, a prominent Japanese collector, and from the Pundole family whose art gallery was one of the first set up in India.

“What is becoming clearer with each auction is that works that are fresh to the market, with impeccable and historically relevant provenance, command a substantial premium when they appear on the auction block,” says Dadiba Pundole’s, who runs the gallery with his name and has been a close friend of Fukuoka for many years.

In the $17.3m Saffronart auction a signficant work by V.S.Gaitonde, usually a top seller getting record prices, failed however to sell even though it had good Pundole-linked provenance. Slow bidding stopped at Rs16 crore ($1.93m), well under the low estimate of Rs20 crore ($2.44m). There is now a possibility of a private sale for a price around that estimate.

Saffronart’s record Amrita Sher-Gil work (above and below) was The Story Teller, a 23inx29in oil on canvas, which sold for a hammer price of Rs52 crore (Rs520m) – Rs61.8 crores or $7.45m including the buyer’s premium. Sher-Gil’s previous record was for a similar styled work,The Ladies’ Enclosure, that went at Saffronart in July 2021 for Rs37.8 cores ($5.14m) including the premium. 

Market sources suggest that The Story Teller was bought by Kiran Nadar, India’s most prominent collector, for her renowned Museum of Art in Delhi. The museum already has The Ladies’ Enclosure.

Sher-Gil died in 1941, at the early age of 28, just four years after painting The Story Teller. There are only 172 of her works documented, 95 of which are in Indian museums, notably the National Gallery of Modern Art. She has a special rarity value internationally because her works were declared “national treasures” by the Indian government in the 1970s, along with those of eight other artists, which means that works in India cannot leave the country.

Born in Budapest  in 1913 with an ill-suited Sikh aristocrat father and a Hungarian Jewish opera-singing mother, Sher-gil was brought up first in India and then Paris from the age of 8. The Story Teller belongs to an important period in the artist’s work, merging her European and Indian influences.

“Europe belongs to Picasso, Matiusse, Braque and many others. India belongs only to me,” she declared with what has been described as her “characteristic audacity”. Included in the auction were works from her childhood, which sold well above estimates.

The auction also set world records for lesser-known artists such as A Ramachandran at $534,940 and K.K.Hebbar at $318,072 plus Antonio Piedade da Cruz, S Nandagopal and J Maggs.

At the AstaGuru auction, a record price of $735,043 was reached for Winter Morning by Ganesh Pyne, beating the artist’s previous $529,200 record established at Sotheby’s New York in March last year.

The evidence of less prominent artists attracting top prices was picked up by Dadiba Pundole who told me, “As we have also seen in our last few sales, the market is widening and consistently giving due recognition to more modern artists such as Jeram Patel, Somnath Hore and Bikash that go beyond the list of usual suspects. Like elsewhere in the world female artists such as Arpita Singh and Nalini Malani are also quickly moving up the ranks of India’s most sought-after artists. All these factors indicate a healthy and robust market that is steadily growing its collector base at all levels of value”.

The Rs51.75 crore ($6.27m) including buyer’s premium record at the Pundole’s sale was set for Gestation (above), a 69inx69in acrylic on canvas by S.H.Raza, one of India’s premier artists from the mid 20th century Progressive group.

Painted in 1989 in Raza’s typical bindu style, it came from the Pundole family’s collection and has been widely quoted in studies of the artist’s work. It fetched a hammer price of Rs45 crore ($5.4m), three times the low estimate.

Records were also set for works by two of Raza’s contemporaries. Hunger, a 69inx51in poly-vinyl acetate and oil on canvas by F.N.Souza sold for Rs34.5 crore ($4.18m) including the premium, and a bronze sculpture by Tyeb Mehta, better known for his large scale paintings, that set a world record for a modern Indian sculpture at Rs14.95 crore ($1.76m) at almost three times the top estimate.

Early works by Souza from the de Boer collection also did well at Saffronart including Lovers, a 1963 27inx38in mixed media on silk selling over three times the estimate at Rs81.61 lakhs ($98,313), and a 1958 8inx13in pen and ink urban landscape that sold for Rs 26.4 lakhs ($31,807), over five times its high estimate.

Overall, these results show how general optimism in India is feeding into activity in the auction rooms. The country’s modern and contemporary art market is still way behind China’s in terms of prices realised, but it is beginning to show growth that has not always been evident in recent years.