"If I were a Rich Man"

8 Dec 06 IAN Saffronart online auction fetches $15.3 million

By Uma Nair, Indo-Asian News Service (full article)

Mumbai, Dec 8 (IANS) The Saffronart winter online auction of modern Indian art, which featured 160 canvases by 43 Indian artists, earned a total of Rs.68.6 million ($15.3 million), Syed Haider Raza's 'Climat' fetching $1.4 million.

The auction, which took place exclusively on Saffronart online Dec 6-7, had 160 lots. Of the 147 works sold, 127 earned above their higher estimates. This auction was the 15th in the series by Saffronart and its structure and time span allowed serious collectors as well as first-time buyers worldwide to place their bids over a period of two days, as opposed to a period of a few hours in a live auction.

Paris-based Raza's 'Climat', a vermilion-toned geometrically poignant work done in 1974, was Lot 84. This acrylic on canvas was estimated at $813,960-1.04 million and went for an astounding $1.4 million, making it a new record for Raza as well as Indian modern art.

Another record was Tyeb Mehta's Lot 16, a brilliantly evocative untitled acrylic on canvas in shades of moss green and mahogany - a metaphor for the rickshaw puller of Shantiniketan.

This work with its iconic gravity and its cosmic echo set bidders across the globe in a frenzy. Estimated between $697,680-930,240, the work went for a hefty $1.10 million.

The inimitable F.N. Souza was well attended in this auction with a number of works. Among his best was Lot 145 'Elongated Head with Nails and Arrows' which went for $492,317.

Of great interest were a number of works by the new artist Jogen Chowdhury. An impassioned work of a seated woman in a flowered sari was an untitled work done in 1988. The oil on canvas estimated at $75,000-85,000 and went for $123,750.

« If I were a rich man » A love affair

Sorry for my English, I know that it is not right and sometimes really bad, but I like it and need to write. I think it’s still very difficult for somebody who is not Indian, on the paper or with soul, to understand right the contemporary and modern Indian art. If many foreigners are now interested in the Indian art, it’s generally more by the art market than the skate of art. And it’s fine like that.

I don’t think that the art is universal. I like this sentence of Stuart Davis, an American artist, saying the universal finds itself in the local to explain his own paintings made during the 50’-60’ and inspired by his own urban American cultural context. It’s like that we must understand the drippings of Jackson Pollock. Dancing around his canvas put on the ground like the Indians Navajos tribe danced and drawn on the sand, Jackson Pollock, mixing this local cultural influence with the history of occidental modern art, has found the universality through local context. If we don’t know that, the Pollock’s drippings we would appear only like some spectacular fireworks paintings.

So, I think that it is impossible to really understand the contemporary and modern Indian art If you only know the Marcel Duchamp’s “Fontaine” (a ready made typically french and universal), If you exclusively know the European art history. If we don’t know a minimum the Indian art history, the low and high Indian culture, it’s just impossible, not only to understand it, but certainly to fall in love with it.
Each culture in the Global Village is different because each culture have its own roots. Still different for a long time, if we continue to sample roots and novelty, and try with the same success to find the universal on the local.

I did my own Indian modern artistic education seeing first the Jamini Roy and Manjit Bawa paintings which made me think of popular art of West Bengal, like Patua and Kalighat paintings. I assimilated their anthropomorphic forms to the idea that I had of the Indian culture’s nature. I discovered the Indians artistic theoretical reading the K.G. Subranayam and J. Swaminathan books. I was very enthusiastic with the grafic furious energy of Francis Newton Souza and Jogen Chowdhury works. I was a lucky man to meet Akbar Padambsee, Gieve Patel, Ravinder Reddy, Bhupen Khakhar and Jogen Chowdhury in India few years ago and to be able to speak with them about the Indian art discovering in the mean time their own works. In Paris, I met V. Vishwanadhan and S. H. Raza which gives me the possibility to understand how we can live several cultures at the same time.

These five paintings (reproduced below) presenting on Saffronart Winter Online Auction 2006 represent an important part of my initiation. This painting of Manjit Bawa was one of the first I reproduced on a file to promote the Contemporary Indian Art in Europe. If I were a rich man (we have a very popular song like that : If I were a rich man, chabada bada bada... and I’m sure we can find the same all around the world), I would buy these five paintings to keep with me a representative mark of my starting love story with the contemporary Indian art.
Hervé Perdriolle, 17 novembre 2006

Ravinder Reddy, Visakhapatnam 1999, photo Hervé Perdriolle

Bhupen Khakhar, Jogen Chowdhury, Richard Long and Denise Hooker, Mumbai January 2003, photo Hervé Perdriolle

Paintings Saffronart Winter Online Auction 2006