S.Kalidas' Archive

Art Mart: Rising Tide

By S. Kalidas

If you thought the Mumbai stock exchange was the biggest feel good story emanating out of India, you can think again. The real show stopper in the last year or two has been contemporary Indian art. From a modest eight to ten crores in 2000, the total annual turnover of the Indian art mart shot up to a whopping Rs 2000 crore last year. Half of this is in documented public transactions such as open auctions and recorded sales, while an equal amount is attributed to direct cash purchases either from the producer or his dealer. A giant leap indeed from the time — just a few years ago— when almost 70-80 percent of all art purchases used to be in cash and hence beyond the purview of accountibility. However, the party, all experts agree, is just beginning.

Take the signifiers: till just five or six years ago, virtually all international auction houses would deal mainly in Indian antiquities (of mostly of doubtful provenance) and the decorative arts with the odd Ravi Varma, Jamini Roy or AR Chughtai thrown in towards the end of the sale. Today, the order is reversed. It is names like Tyeb Mehta, MF Husain, SH Raza and FN Souza  that lead the list now. Last week saw New York again hosting yet another round of Indian contemporary art auctions. Over March 29 and 30, the Sotheby’s and the Christies in the course of two hectic sessions of global bidding (including incessant phone  bids from India) sold off 368 art works for a whopping sum totalling to US $ 29.27 million. In the last few years, not only have these auction houses doubled their Indian art auctions from one each to now four a year, they have been joined by others like Bonhams, Bowerings, Neville Tuli's Osians and Dinesh Vazirani's Saffronart, the last two being fully swadeshi enterprises.

With octogenarian Mumbai artist Tyeb Mehta’s now historic Mahishasura already having broken the million dollar barrier (it went for US $ 1.54 million) just six months ago at the Christies September ’05 auction, there were no new benchmarks left to ford. However, while Mehta repeated his million-dollar-plus performance, an untitled canvas by Vasudeo Narayan Gaitonde fetched US $ 1.47 million st Christies and Syed Haider Raza’s  Tapovan went for US$ 1.472 million. Souza’s Pope and his Nephews was sold for  US$ 508,000 and an untitled abstract by J. Swaminathan notched US $ 800,000 double than its estimated US $ 300,000 - 400,000. And that is not taking into account the OSIANs New Delhi sale of Masterpieces and Museum Quality Works (totaling Rs 417,260,250) in New Delhi— where A Village Scene by the legendary Amrita Sher-Gil went for Rs 6.9 crores —and Saffronart’s in online auction of younger and lesser known artists in Mumbai that netted Rs 17.66 crore. 

With Lakshmi, the goddess of good fortune smiling on Indian art, it is not surprising that everyone who’s anyone wants a slice of the pie. Or, if that is too expensive, at least catch a wiff of its tantalising aroma. You have only to mention that you posess a few paintings or are ‘in the know’ of matters artistic and suddenly you find yourself very popular. They corner you at parties for tips, they invite you to dinners for deep discussions, they call you up at all hours of the day and the night (it is day in New York when it’s night in Delhi)— now they have even started accosting me at street corners. And they come in many disguises. They come as suave NRI patrons out to set out on their Discover of India and they come as friendly local acquaintances dropping in casually for a drink. One even came in as a carpenter offering to frame a painting before he bared his greed and offered to buy the painting for “a good price”. My poor till-lately-impoverished artist friends are now looking worn out  with fatigue running from this gallery opening to that auction sale; they are all bleary-eyed and heavy headed with a combination of jet-lag and champagne overdose. Two Delhi painters even had to get themselves hospitalised due to stress and anxiety. In fact, my painter brother regularly sweeps under his bed to dispel any lurking agents and gallerists. Spurred by a feeding frenzy escalated by highly publicised public auctions, our new rich elite's new-found art fad is displaying all signs of an obsession that is bound to last for some time yet.

“I know it seems like a mad and crazy market but it is for real,” sighs Bangalore based Abhishek Poddar, an old time collector who started buying art in the late 1980s when “you could easily pick up a Manjit Bawa or a Jagdish Swaminathan for a few thousand rupees”. Poddar says, “While initially a few market savvy dealers might have jacked up the prices, combined with the strengthening Indian economy it has gathered a momentum that now has the impetus of an avalanche.”  Like most serious buyers of pre-stock market boom era, Poddar has almost stopped collecting today: “We used to  fall in love with the work, then met and got to know the artist and connected to his thought process. One looked for the soul of the artist in a work. Whereas today, anonymous bidders tend to merely see the signature of a brand name.”  Most old time patrons find their powers of patronage suddenly passé, usurped by a new and brash generation of buyers who are ready to buy them out. In fact many sophisticates in Mumbai and Delhi who had bought masters like Husain and Souza after striking bitter bargains with the artists and dealers through the ’70s and ’80s are now unloading their tidy hoards on the scalding market, making a neat pile in the process.

So how did this spurt in the art mart come about? Who are the big players in the field? Who are the new cash rich buyers? And who are the blue-chip artists to invest in the future?

Well, for one let us not be coy about the fact that Indian art is very good and comparable to the best produced anywhere. This may come as surprise to some but artists and serious critics knew it all along and have assiduoudly worked to have it so accepted in the western art scene. Three Indian painters—MF Husain, Francis Newton Souza and Jaghdish Swaminathan —passionately articulated this all their lives. Husain had even predicted a long time ago that Indian art would truly prosper only when financial speculators entered the market. Today there are already a couple of Art Funds — like mutual funds— in operation (see box). jagdish Swaminathan— to quote New York based art historian Vidya Dahejia— “talked about going beyond the West by going through the West”. 

As our economy gained muscle and Indians started taking pride in things Indian. “Although he has nothing to do with art, Narayanamurthy and the likes of him have shown that we can be proud of the made-in-India brand in the global context,” says Amit Judge of Bodhi Art. It was thus but natural that Indian art got its rightful place under the sun. Says critic Suneet Chopra: “From the very begining, I told people that Indian art was priced at a sixth of its true value. Even today, it is about half its value. That is why I tell cynics who think that the bubble is going to burst, that there is another good 100 per cent more to go.” 

That potential will be realised when our big industrial houses start professionally advised and managed programs of art acquisition and display. This is happening but is still not professionalised. “It is still left to the wives or to other relatives,” says an artist referring to some leading business groups’s efforts in the sphere. The first major corporate buyers of Indian art were MNCs like the Schlumberger whose Jean Riboud and his Indian wife Krishna collected a huge body of excellent works from 1960s –till the 1980s.  The other major collector was Holk Larsen of Larsen and Tubro. Later Texan billionaire Chester and wife Davida Herwitz went about collecting a huge body of Indian art that is now partly housed at the Peabody Essex Museum Salem Masachusetts. Then there is the irrepressible Masanori Fukuoka, a Japanese tycoon, who now leads the Indian art lovers’ club buying a large numbers of works every year for his Glenbarra Art Museum at Jihoji Himeji, Japan. Amongst the few Indian corporates seriously interested in art are the ITC and The Times of India Group who also acquired art in significant quantities. The new Times Internet Building in Gurgaon has in fact been designed specially to display their large art collection. Both have built up sizable and carefully chosen collections which are now worth in hundreds of crores, many times the value they were acquired for. The Government of India, too, through Air India, the ITDC and the MEA, bought good contemporary art but it has neither taken pride in it nor promoted it in any significant way. In fact, today one can easily see the sorry state of art works by famous painters at ITDC hotels if they have not been entirely destroyed or, worse, pilfered.

However, the arrival of the new breed of art buyers on the scene in the last three or four years has pushed prices well beyond he Government of India purchase budgets. It is widely presumed that it is the Non Resident Indian market that is escalating the art prices. While NRI collectors like hedge fund manager Rajiv Choudhury (he bought Tyeb Mehta’s  Mahisasura) and realtor Umesh Garg have definitely upped the ante, Arun Vadehra insists that more than 50 percent of his buyers are in India. “NRIs and foreign individuals and mueums only account for less than 25 percent each,” he says. For example, Delhi businessman Nand Khemka was the most prolific bidder at OSIANs auction, reportedly picking up both the Amrita Sher-Gil (6.8 crores) and the Gaitonde (2.3 crore). Yamini Mehta, senior specialist, Modern and Indian contemporary Art at Christies, New York, says, “What I have been seeing is that collectors are not only the NRIs but also resident Indians. For the March sale we also strong bids from some American collectors. At the same time, we have noticed that buyers are beginning to discern quality and hence every piece of art is not selling at a crazy price.” Indeed the Indian art collector is at last coming of age.

It is interesting that much like the development of India, in the art scene too, the problem area is the infrastructure. “We have always had excellent art and now there is a hungry market, but the problem lies in the channel connecting the two,” says Amit Judge of Bodhi Art, easily India’s most robust and audacious art gallery. Similarly, Arun Vadehra of Vadehra Gallery has been publishing books on the artists that he represents for many years now. Neville Tuli of OSIANs has also been absorbed with the need of building a proper documentation and archiving centre for over a decade now. In fact this is the area that the government art bodies should be attending to instead of taking on promotional and curatorial roles. The other thing that the state could do is the in-explicably high import duty of 17.5 percent on bringing back Indian art from abroad. Some gallerists even go to the extent of asking for the removal of sales tax on art purchase. At the same time the government should also enforce the Intellectual Property Right Law forcefully including the artists’ share on resale of his or her work.

So where is this market heading? “We are yet to reach the levels of Chinese art,  European and American art so there is a long way to go,” says Vadehra. With proper promotion and infrastructure support there is no reason why that should not happen. Of course, periodically there will be rationalisation of individual artists’ works depending on their stature, quality and numbers. Let me end with sharing a phone conversation I had with a friend who owns a resplendent work by my father, J. Swaminathan. She has been  wanting to buy a flat in Delhi’s fashionable enclave overlooking the Humayun’s Tomb but could not get one at a price she could afford. When she read that a Swaminathan had gone for US $ 800,000 at the Sotheby’s, I called her up and said, “Now you can sell your Swaminathan and buy that flat you have always wanted.” “Silly Boy,” She replied, “Now I wait another few years and aspire to buying the tomb itself.” Amen.