An artist less celebrated

How relevant is K K Hebbar as an Indian modernist? With a retrospective of his work showing at the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, after it ran to apparently packed houses at NGMA Bangalore, it is important to try and place him within the grid of India’s first flush of artists who brought both the Western and the Indian idioms to bear on their painting tradition. Many of those artists are not just national but also global icons. Where does Hebbar fit into all this?

Hebbar was 85 when he died in 1996, long enough to get a measure of his own influence on the art movement in India as also on the market. Like many of his contemporaries, he was both a product of and later a teacher at the Sir J J School of Art, though unlike many of them he refused to subscribe to any particular group or movement. His travels around Europe and further training at the Academy Julian in Paris resulted in his viewing, and imbibing, strong elements of impressionism and expressionism, techniques that remained with him throughout his own career.

His content remained staunchly Indian with, particularly, his paintings of Indian dance — he was fascinated by kathak, captured the mudras of bharatanatyam, and reflected the vibrance and abandon of tribal celebrations. This was his largest, and probably strongest, body of art, one with which most art-lovers identified him, though he also painted landscapes of, particularly, Kerala, as well as humanistic works. His daughter says he also devoted his energy to doing work on music, though these are rarer to find. Sadly, then, one such work, showing two musicians, on offer for a value under Rs 5 lakh by Christie’s New York in September this year, failed to find a buyer.

Perhaps because his brushwork changed so much over his oeuvre, or because he exhibited modestly, it was not always possible for an art-lover to instinctively tell whether a work was by Hebbar or not. This may be a reason why the market did not put him in the same bandwidth as his peers, though, like them, he participated at important biennales. His market, though, is not at a similar standing: The highest price he commanded at an auction was for an Untitled oil on canvas in December 2006 (Rs 33.5 lakh).

There seems to have been a fall in his value since: an Untitled lot depicting a bowl of roses was auctioned online by Saffronart in May 2006 for Rs 20.5 lakh, but perhaps a distress sale caused by the recession led to the same work being auctioned on the same site in 2009 for a mere Rs 13.8 lakh (the same price that he commanded the previous year for another work, Fish Haul). Globally too, Sotheby’s gaveled Untitled works by him for Rs 6 lakh in March last year, and for Rs 20 lakh in March this year. Drawings by him are available for as little as Rs 2 lakh, though on average they might command between Rs 3 lakh and Rs 4 lakh.

The market is an inaccurate barometer of an artist’s worth which has pushed up prices for the less worthy while ignoring others. The current retrospective will go a long way in restoring confidence in Hebbar, whose most significant works were created from the mid-’40s to the mid-’50s, and who needs to be better acknowledged for his role in the country’s tryst with modernism.

Kishore Singh is a Delhi-based writer and art critic.
These views are personal and do not reflect those of the organisation with which he is associated