MF Husain’s Untitled (Gram Yatra), a 14ft masterpiece depicting vignettes of India’s rural life, has turn into the most costly work of recent Indian artwork ever offered at a public public sale.
The 1954 mural-sized portray fetched $13.8m (£10.6m) at Christie’s in New York on 19 March, almost quadrupling its anticipated worth of $3.5m and setting a brand new benchmark for South Asian fashionable artwork.
The earlier document was held by Amrita Sher-Gil’s The Story Teller (1937), which offered in Mumbai final yr for $7.4m.
It’s now the second-highest worth ever fetched by a South Asian art work, surpassed solely by the $24.6m sale of a Twelfth-century black stone bodhisattva sculpture at Christie’s New York in 2017.
Initially acquired by Norwegian surgeon and artwork collector Leon Elias Volodarsky in 1954 whereas main a WHO workforce in Delhi, Untitled (Gram Yatra) remained largely unseen for over 70 years in a non-public hall of Oslo College Hospital, the place it was donated by Volodarsky’s property in 1964.
Now often called The Volodarsky Husain, the portray was consigned for public sale by Oslo College Hospital, with the proceeds supposed to fund a medical coaching centre.
The record-breaking art work noticed aggressive bidding from 5 contenders earlier than being acquired by an undisclosed establishment by way of Nishad Avari, Christie’s head of South Asian Trendy and modern artwork.
Journalist and writer John Elliot, in his weblog Using the Elephant, writes that Indian artwork collector and philanthropist Kiran Nadar is “believed to have received the work for her well-known New Delhi artwork museum often called KNMA”.
The Impartial has reached out to the Kiran Nadar Museum of Artwork for affirmation.
“We’re thrilled to have been part of setting a brand new benchmark worth for the work of Maqbool Fida Husain and all the class. This can be a landmark second and continues the extraordinary upward trajectory of the Trendy and Modern South Asian Artwork market,” he stated.
“It contains of 13 separate vignettes of village life in India, which is actually vital, as a result of that is 5 years after Indian independence, and Husain and all his colleagues try to determine on the time what it means to be a contemporary Indian artist,” Mr Avari stated of Untitled (Gram Yatra).
Based on a word accompanying the work, Untitled (Gram Yatra), that means “village pilgrimage”, “shouldn’t be solely one of many largest, however maybe essentially the most vital portray by the artist from the Fifties. This monumental portray is Husain’s magnum opus, a cornerstone of his oeuvre celebrating the variety and dynamism of a newly unbiased nation. As such, Gram Yatra is an exemplar of nation-building by way of artwork”.
Describing it as “by far one of the vital works” he has seen in his profession, Mr Avari informed ArtNews that the method of buying the portray was a 13-year course of, which concerned getting permission from the Oslo College Hospital’s board when the establishment determined to promote.
MF Husain, dubbed the “Picasso of India”, is without doubt one of the most celebrated figures in fashionable Indian artwork. A founding member of the Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group, he performed a key position in shaping Indian modernism within the Forties, mixing influences from classical Indian artwork with Western expressionist methods.
His distinctive type explored themes starting from mythology and historical past to rural and concrete India.
Whereas his works, together with sequence on Gandhi, Mom Teresa and the epics Ramayana and Mahabharata, gained widespread acclaim, a few of his later work sparked controversy for his or her nude depictions of Hindu deities. Going through authorized battles and threats, Husain lived in self-imposed exile in London till his loss of life in 2011, aged 95.
Earlier this yr, a courtroom in India ordered the seizure of two work by Husain over a lawyer’s criticism that they have been allegedly “offensive” and “damage spiritual sentiments”.
The work – that includes Hindu deities Ganesha and Hanuman alongside nude feminine figures – have been being displayed at DAG, New Delhi, previously Delhi Artwork Gallery.
The courtroom later dismissed the lawyer’s petition looking for a case to be registered in opposition to the gallery on costs of intentionally and maliciously outraging spiritual emotions.
“Given its implicit perception in creative freedom, the DAG denies any wrongdoing as alleged by the complainant who has publicly claimed to be principally pushed by a non secular agenda,” the gallery stated in an announcement to The Impartial.
