Indian art goes global

Forget about the painter slaving away unbeknownst in his garret: today's Indian painter is an international figure, making waves at global auctions, earning in the crores per canvas. But has Indian art really arrived?

By Yatish Yadav

A few years ago, artists—gesticulating profoundly, beards as long as Methuselah's, smelling of the arts from toe to curlicue, haring around from one gallery to another for the smallest of deals—were a common enough phenomenon. Artists were not artists if they were not living lives of cultured poverty.

Today, everything's changed: the New Age artists are ready to take on world, armed with laptops, Internet connections, painting, woodcut, lithographic and scraperboard software. Those early, impecunious artists are now in the thick of the flow of patronage and Chardonnay.

Welcome to the nouveau marché of Indian art: it's as much an investment idea as a creative one. It has become a better and safer bet to buy new Indian art than it was in the closing years of the past century: it has international cachet, and international auctions are the norm.

Nonetheless, since it is still a fledgling market, with no financial yardstick to go except those set by meisters such as M F Husain, Tyeb Mehta, Anjolie Ela Menon and Bikash Bhattacharya, it is still possible to pick up relatively inexpensive buys that will escalate as the years go by.

The India-born veteran artist and acknowledged Father of Modern Indian Art, Francis Newton Souza's painting, Amsterdam Landscape, fetched more than Rs 5 crore at a recent Sotheby's auction in London. While in dollar or pound or Euro terms, that might seem a pittance—Yamini Mehta, a modern Indian art specialist, says, "Certain works by young and dynamic artists do stand out and deserve the prices they may be making. Indian art is essentially still undervalued when compared to what comparable masters of Western art are selling for"—it isn't so in Indian money. This is big, so big that Sotheby is looking at Indian paintings with unprecedented seriousness.
Edward Gibbs, head of sales at Sotheby, says, "The high price is confirmation of the underlying strength of the market for modern and contemporary Indian paintings, a collecting category that has experienced remarkable growth in recent years." Experts declare this escalation as a consequence of the expansion of the Indian economy and a growing global awareness of the contribution of Indian artists in the 20th century.

Apart from Sotheby, Christie's and Bonhams are other major auctions houses busy promoting and selling Indian masters. All of them have high-flying Page 3 representatives in India, hobnobbing with both the Old Monied and the nouveau riche sets. Non-resident Indians have begun stocking up promising new artists. More adept at the noticing the finessing of artworks and more informed about Post-Modern art, they have become a gaggle of oracles for the Indian "smart set"—information disseminators on which paintings and sculptures to buy, and whose, and at what price.

According to the Bonhams balance sheet—available with Realpolitik—its turnover crossed Rs 25 crore in mid-2006. Sources reveal that Bonhams did business worth more than Rs 10 crore on April 6 alone during its sale of premium contemporary Indian paintings.

"Western auction houses and galleries have avoided Indian contemporary art, except for a few old works of artists such as Raja Ravi Verma," says Mehreen Rizvi-Khursheed, specialist in Indian and Islamic art at Bonhams auctions at London, "and during that time the market for India was not so buoyant. Because of the recent revolution, however, auction houses have realised the potential of Indian art." Bonhams sold off 40 works on paper by Souza on May 3 this year—the first time that an auction house had chosen to hold a sale of the works of a single Indian artist instead of clumping them together.

It's not only the foreign auction houses that are foraging: Saffron Art and Osians are two major desi players, together in control of 40 per cent of the market share, a fact that surely couldn't be making Sotheby and Christie's happy. They hold promotions cobbled together with sales every three months or so, ramping up the regularity of art exhibitions and drawing more buyers into the vortex.
But hardcore investors, whose business it is not to understand the finer nuances of art but is to know what pays, are ready to put up humongous sums of money as they feel that the share market is as secure as a rickety rollercoaster. In September 2004, M F Husain had signed a Rs 100-crore deal with the Mumbai-based Swaropp Srivastava Group for a series of 125 paintings titled Our Planet called Earth.

Says Anshuman Mehta, an Indian art collector for decades, "One canvas gives approximately 33 per cent more returns than my money in the stock market. It took a few years, but finally Indian art has arrived, with its scale growing up and more and more people investing in art.”

Obviously, younger artists have also entered the fray, or are trying to. "I think some works are not getting their due prices," says Bonhams Mehreen. "One only has to compare the strength and breadth of Indian art to other significant civilizations-it's time that Indian art compete with international art at an international level."

Desi Saffron art has taken a novel approach-online auctions. It is now possible to put up high-resolution pictures of paintings on offer, and software to prevent "scavenging", or downloading and printing of the paintings on sale. In May this year, Desi Saffron featured 150 works by 41 Indian artists, and ended up with sales totaling $12.9 million (Rs 59.34 crore), with Souza being the top-selling artist. Besides Souza, Tyeb Mehta, Akbar Padmsee, S H Raza, Jogen Choudhery and M F Husain created niches for themselves online.

Tyeb Mehta had already been in the news with his oil painting Mahishasur, which was sold for record price Rs 6.87 crore at a Christie's auction in September 2005. What was surprising was that the lesser-known V N Gaitonde totted up Rs.6.57 crore, along with S H Raza's At Rs 6.5 crore. Both Subodh Gupta and Atul Dodiya hit the crore marks, too. Gupta is creating waves in the market with his unique iconography-the milkman, bicycle, suitcases, and utensils. His "milkman" painting went for Rs 60 lakh at a Desi S Saffron auction in March. In May, Christie's sold two of his works for unrevealed crores of rupees at a Hong Kong auction.

Johny M L, the editor of India's first e-zine, Matters of Art, says, "In the coming years, the young generation of artists will take over and sustain the market for quite a long time. There is a bit of suspicion among investors and collectors regarding high prices, but this storm will settle slowly and only the best contemporary art will survive."

In order to sustain the current rapid growth, institutions such as Osians are even starting art mutual funds, a marketing concept that the older generation of idealistic artists would have balked at. It is offering an option to investors to move from blue-chip stocks to "blue-paint" art. Neville Tuli, chairperson of Osians, is confident of raising at least Rs100-125 crore through the art mutual fund, which was launched on June 5 and has a lock-in period of 36 months with a minimum investment of Rs10 lakh.

"Some more funds will be coming this year, as the market for Indian art is crossing all hurdles and becoming popular even among foreign investors," says Priyanka Mathew, specialist, director of Arts India Gallery, New York.

Arts India has curated a couple of travelling exhibition in the US, such as in Dallas and Chicago. Recently, it organised an annual artists' retreat-a confluence of artists from the US and India. Arts India buys directly from the artists, avoiding the secondary market, thus helping to pack in more direct, unmediated profit into the artists' pockets. With a turnover of Rs 20 crore till May 2006, Arts India is now organising an exhibition-cum-sale for new, emerging artists from India, those who lack exposure but still have a great deal of aesthetic value to offer.

Being a primary market, art galleries such as Arts India are promoting the East as the new hub of art intellectuals. Says Priyanka Mathew, "We return 70 per cent of the profit to the artist directly, and keep 30 percent with ourselves. This helps artists circumvent any kind of fraud, and a sustainable relationship keeps the money tap running throughout the year.

"The market has not done justice to artists for a very long time, [and] this is the time to pay back and clear their dues. Indian art has seen a great spike in prices-it is a very broad rising of the bar: most artists who have been struggling for a while are now seeing fruits of their labour."

Artists such as Ram Kumar, J Swaminathan and Paritosh Sen, whose work has been unequivocally admired but has never received the recompense it should have, will probably now get their due.
Yamini Mehta, a modern Indian art specialist, says, "Certain works by young and dynamic artists do stand out and deserve the prices they may be making. Indian art is essentially still undervalued when compared to what comparable masters of Western art are selling for."