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| Hang in there, my lovely |
| Kishore Singh / New Delhi Apr 21, 2010, 00:01 IST |
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India’s highest-paid women artists aren’t bringing in the big bucks, a pointer to a glass ceiling in the liberal world of art.
It’s unfair, it’s sexist, but it’s also true: women artists don’t measure up to their male counterparts in value, even though they’ve been around for as long as the modern world of modern art has existed. At a time when the Tagores were brewing a new wash technique for a nationalist spirit, Sunayani Devi — Rabindranath Tagore’s sister — spent her time in the kitchen not cooking but using the water for washing vegetables to, well, wash her wash paintings. Even Raja Ravi Varma’s sister was a mean painter, she only lacked the opportunity her brother enjoyed. And when they didn’t know what to make of modernism, it was Amrita Sher-Gil who brought a breath of fresh air to bear on Indian art.
Even now, as then, it’s the male artists who command the big bucks while women have been relegated to a distant second spot. They don’t make it to the list of the top five artists (in value), living or posthumous, and probably not to the top ten list either, with the exception of Amrita Sher-Gil. And Sher-Gil hits the m-spot not so much for her talent as for the scarcity of her works. Even so, the highest a Sher-Gil painting has fetched in an auction is Rs 6.9 crore, almost half of what a painting by S H Raza or F N Souza might fetch. In fact, the better works by her male peers Raja Ravi Varma, Souza, Raza, M F Husain or even the newbie Subodh Gupta, routinely compete for prices in the Rs 5-10 crore bracket. Whereas Sher-Gil’s triumph is a measure of rarity over quality.
But Sher-Gil’s success seems greater when compared with her sorority — records made available by Saffronart point to Bharti Kher topping the list at Rs 1.83 crore for her Landscape, Arpita Singh at Rs 1.78 crore for her Stop Ringing The Bell, and Anju Dodiya’s The Site peaking at Rs 1.07 crore. Interestingly, all these prices are for 2008 or earlier, following which they’ve plummeted steeply. Anjolie Ela Menon, almost everyone’s favourite pick for inclusion among India’s most expensive women artists, has yet to break the Rs 1 crore barrier, and few women artists have breached even the Rs 50 lakh benchmark, though, reportedly, a very large work by Jayasri Burman recently fetched Rs 65 lakh (equalling Menon’s highest price — see box). Most senior women artists find themselves hemmed into the Rs 10-30 lakh range — and that’s when they’re lucky and the works are exceptional.
The point of all this number crunching is, of course, to point out the raw deal women artists end up with. Unfortunate though that might be, the two questions that one ought to ask are: 1) is it a true representation of their value; and 2), what’s in it for collectors?
To understand that, consider the content and context of women artists. While many are full-time artists, there’s no escaping the duality of their lives: precedence for matrimony, motherhood and domestic responsibilities and, as in other fields, perhaps even subservience to their artist spouses. As a result of this, they tend to paint concerns different from those of male artists. The female artist will more likely depict scenes of social intimacy and domesticity, or aspects of their feminine or feminist selves, as compared to the ambitious grandstanding of male artists to more national or global perspectives. While we recognise this, does it negate what a Nilima Sheikh or Arpana Caur or Gogi Saroj Pal set out to do? Is their talent, or art, any less than that of their male counterparts?
A woman’s canvas is invariably (but not always) either more sentimental, or more decorative, and the subject tends to appeal more to the heart. But investors, and these days even collectors, tend to refer to the head when making an investment decision — and history shows that male artists have delivered better value in both the short and long term. Perhaps it’s a coincidence that the bulk of collectors in this country are also men. Which is why the skewed realisation in values will not change at least until more women join the growing ranks of art collectors.
These views are personal and do not reflect those of the organisation with which the writer is associated.
kishoresingh_22@hotmail.com
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