Screaming, with surprise

After the Mona Lisa, The Scream is perhaps the most discussed, dissected, hated, applauded, analysed, doodled or caricatured painting — and now, at Rs 600 crore, it is also the most expensive work ever to be auctioned. That one painting alone commands a value almost equivalent to the entire size of the Indian art market (estimated annually anywhere between Rs 750-1,000 crore) might appear to make a mockery of the fraternity’s faux sophistication, but more about that later.

Analysts and art writers will be hard put to explain how any one work can be so extraordinarily valued. That the work in question is Edvard Munch’s The Scream will not make their task any easier. Widely used all over the world, in newspapers and magazines and academic journals, to illustrate the condition of modern man, The Scream, at first sight, hardly seems the sort of painting to make the heart of a collector beat faster. It is a maudlin work, reflecting a sense of frustration and rage and hopelessness — a man holding his skeletal head in his hand while his mouth is open in a maw of anguish. In the background, colours whirl claustrophobically. Here is a work that celebrates the end of the world rather than its beauty. Why pay so much for it?

Perhaps the reason has to do with the fact that, after the Mona Lisa, and give or take Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers and Monet’s Water Lilies, this is one of the most widely recognised paintings in the world. Fewer people might know the name of the artist, but in every likelihood they would have seen the work in print, on T-shirts, coffee mugs or as posters. Even the fact that there are three other, similar works by the artist in a museum in Norway, do not detract from its collectability.

The Scream beat Pablo Picasso’s previous record of two years ago for his Nude, Green Leaves and Bust by a decisive Rs 25 crore. Picasso’s work had been acquired by a collector in China, but no one knows yet the new owner of Munch’s seminal work, which saw brisk bidding in the last 15 minutes that raised the value from its estimated Rs 400 crore to the winning Rs 600 crore. The total value of New York’s Sotheby’s sale was Rs 1,700 crore, triggering hope of the Western art market finally edging out of its three-year slump.

While any hope of a recovery is still premature, individual works have been finding buyers at record-selling prices, perhaps because rare works entering the market to create liquidity for their owners are attracting those with wealth but no previous access to high-value masters. The trickle to buy quality works in developing countries could soon become the proverbial flood, but what lessons are there in it for India?

The nascent Indian market, which is still awestruck by the prices S H Raza, Tyeb Mehta, F N Souza or Subodh Gupta command, is echoing the Western market in appreciating values for rare or historic works. But at a high of Rs 16.5 crore and trailing, there is a lot of room for Indian masters and globally-recognised artists to grow, an opportunity the country is losing out on because it does not have the state support that the Chinese art market does. Private entrepreneurship has been responsible for building up exposure, knowledge and prices, and this column is once again willing to venture that by the end of this decade, at least one work by an Indian master would have touched the seemingly impossible Rs 100 crore benchmark for a work of art. Who that artist will be is anybody’s guess right now.

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