Tyeb Mehta painting breaks world record

Source DNA
It was 70 years ago that six of India's contemporary artists – FN Souza, MF Husain, SH Raza, SK Bakre, KH Ara and HA Gade – formed The Progressive Artists’ Group (PAG) in 1947. The 22nd edition of the annual London South Asian Modern + Contemporary Art auction commemorated this vital juncture in Indian art history on May 25 evening. Sixty two of the 68 lots collectively sold for £5,901,625/$7,660,310 and among these 14 sold above $100,000. Tyeb Mehta’s 1994 work, Untitled (Woman on Rickshaw) painting, set a new world auction record for the artist and highest price – £2,741,000/$3,557,818 – in the South Asian Art category globally in 2017. The painting, an analogy for strife and struggle, shows a woman atop a hand-pulled rickshaw – a leitmotif that popped up in Mehta's works since 1950s. “The rickshaw is not a simple means of transport but a sign of bondage,” the late artist is to have said of his work.
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A confluence of Indian Progressive artists in London

Source Architectural Digest
Christie’s London celebrates the 70th year of the Progressives and contemporaries in contemporary Indian art with their South Asian Modern + Contemporary Art auction to be held on May 25, 2017. Christie’s states that over two-thirds of the works to be offered are sourced from private collections and are fresh to the market—these are works which have been acquired directly from either the artists or their galleries and are coming to auction for the first time. Christie’s also states that exceptional examples of rare, early works by all six original members and several of their illustrious associates will be included in the sale. These works recognise these luminaries as the standard bearers for avant-garde Indian modern to this day.
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Aces! Christie’s to auction deck of cards painted by 54 Indian artists

Source The Hindustan Times by Rachel Lopez
In 1976, London’s JPL Gallery hit upon a unique plan for a collection of works. They distributed a standard deck of playing cards (including two Jokers) among 54 top British artists and asked each of them to create their own, distinctive version of the card they received. Artists like Howard Hodgkin, John Hoyland, Patrick Heron, Allen Jones, Maggie Hambling and David Hockney, took up the challenge, contributing to create a Deck of Cards, a collection that represented British art in a cool, new way. Last year, the idea got a reshuffle. The British Council commissioned 54 of India’s top artists to create Taash Ke Patte, a new deck of cards. Artists as varied as Jyoti Bhatt, Nikhil Chopra, Shilpa Gupta, Sudhir Patwardhan, Raqs Media Collective, Anjolie Ela Menon, Syed Haider Raza, Thukral & Tagra and Waswo X Waswo each extended their style to a 36 cm x 30 cm playing card.
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The Big League

Source Indian Express by Vandana Kalra
This is the first year that the prestigious Documenta has forked out of Germany, with a parallel exhibition at Athens, Greece. It is also the year when the contemporary art festival has one of its largest contingents from the Indian subcontinent: more than 16 from a total of 160 participants. Representing the Indian modernists are Nilima Sheikh and Ganesh Haloi, as well as the works of the late Amrita Sher-Gil, Chittaprosad Bhattacharya, Binod Behari Mukherjee and his student at Santiniketan, KG Subramanyan. The contemporaries include Amar Kanwar, Gauri Gill and Nikhil Chopra. While the first leg of the festival has already commenced in Athens, and is on till July 16, the curtains go up in Kassel on June 10.
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‘We Escaped a Nightmare’: Art World Welcomes New French Leader Macron

Source Artnet News by Brian Boucher
As results from the French election started to roll in on Sunday, visitors and exhibitors at this week’s TEFAF New York fair crowded around their glowing iPads, awaiting the results. The art world has reacted with enthusiasm and relief to the decisive win of the centrist candidate Emmanuel Macron, who scored some 66.1 percent of the vote over far-right contestant Marine Le Pen, who scored only 33.9 percent. “We escaped a nightmare,” said Paris dealer Kamel Mennour. “Vive la France! Vive l’Europe! Vive Macron!”, declared dealer Larry Gagosian, who maintains a venue in Paris among his 16 locations, making a rare public comment via email. “This is exactly what we needed at this point,” said Austrian dealer Thaddaeus Ropac. “He was the most pro-European politician of all of them.”
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Henri Cartier-Bresson India in full frame

Source The Rubin Museum
Disputed borders, refugees, charismatic leaders, assassinations—the India of the mid-century does not sound so distant from the world today. It was a time and place captured expertly and in great depth by the pioneering photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004). In 1947 Cartier-Bresson co-founded the internationally renowned cooperative photographic agency Magnum Photos. Later that same year he undertook his first trip to India as part of a three-year stay in Asia. At the time, India was undergoing a massive political transition, having gained independence from British colonial rule and been partitioned from Pakistan. In January 1948 Cartier-Bresson traveled to Delhi to meet with one of the key players in that transition, India’s great leader Mahatma Gandhi. It would be one of Gandhi’s final meetings before the leader’s assassination at the hands of a Hindu nationalist on January 30.
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