Indian Art Boom Generates $96 Million in Two Weeks’ Auctions

Source The Wire John Elliott
There’s a boom in the modern Indian art market with sales totalling £96.2m at international auctions in the past fortnight. Saffronart, the market leader, almost doubled the maximum total for an Indian auction to $40.2m, while Sotheby’s and Pundole each totalled $25.5m and $18.3m with Christie’s trailing at $12.4m. All four were celebrated as “white glove” sales, where all the lots were sold. Top prices have been achieved for a variety of artists. They were inevitably led by members of the ultra-safe Bombay-based Progressives Group, which began in the 1940s, with names such as F.N. Souza, M.F. Husain and V.S. Gaitonde. Records were also set however for later artists including Bhupen Khakhar, Mohan Samant, Arpita Singh Vivan Sundaram and Nalini Malani who have been attracting increasing interest at auctions, though there were few works from contemporary artists.
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The largest M. F. Husain museum, set to open in Qatar, is inspired by the artist’s own sketch

Source Vogue India by Asma Siddiqui
Before MF Husain’s star began to rise in the 1940s, he couldn’t afford proper canvases. Instead, he would paint Bollywood film hoardings overnight, working on giant billboards barefoot, perched precariously on bamboo scaffolding. Rumour has it that he sometimes used leftover paint from these signboards for his own artworks. That early ingenuity gave Husain’s art their bold, larger-than-life strokes, and also explains why, even decades after he became India’s most famous painter, he almost always walked around barefoot. The largest M. F. Husain museum set to open in Qatar is inspired by the artists own sketch. 14 years after his death, Husain’s art has continued to speak to people—even though NFTs and AI have threatened the very axis on which human creativity spins. In March this year, the force of his impact on the art world was felt when ‘(untitled) Gram Yatra’, Husain’s 1954 masterpiece spanning nearly 14 feet, which had remained largely out of public view for decades, sold for $13.8 million at Christie’s South Asian Modern and Contemporary Art auction in New York, making it the most expensive modern Indian artwork ever auctioned.
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