Expat art collection smashes record at Sotheby's London auction

A Bhupen Khakhar sold for $3.2 million, taking the artist to top league

A collection of art that belonged to Guy Barbier — the man who brought consulting firm Arthur Andersen & Co. to India in the late 1970s — fetched double its pre-auction estimate in London on Monday, boding well for season prices for Indian art.

Sotheby’s London auction of Modern & Contemporary South Asian Art realised $9.5 million, with some pieces selling for more than four times the expectation.

The Guy and Helen Barbier Family Collection capsule of 29 paintings alone realised $7 million, with a Bhupen Khakhar — Two Men In Benares — selling for $3.2 million, creating a new benchmark for the artist.

Khakhar was one of the earliest Indian artists to portray his sexual orientation through his work and some dealers who spoke off record indicate that there was strong conjecture on whether his work would manage to achieve estimated prices because of its theme.

This raises the question: Do curated collections by established business figures fetch better auction valuations? “One way to see it is that most of these paintings had never been on sale before and were fresh works that collectors were seeing for the first time,” said Dadiba Pundole, owner of the Pundole Art Gallery. 

Even while the auction was well-attended, with at least a 100 people present, most of the works were bid for on the phone.

Yamini Mehta, deputy chairman, Indian and South Asian Art for Sotheby’s, said the Barbier collection was a historic time capsule because the Barbiers realised no one was highlighting what was contemporary art at the time. “They collected heavily from artists as varied as Ram Kumar, Bhupen Khakhar, Ramachandran and Rameshwar Broota,” she said. 

Beyond just a personal collection, the Barbiers also put out exhibitions of Indian art in Geneva in the 1980s along with other prominent collectors that included Gurcharan Das, Jehangir Nicholson.

What drove the price of Khakhar’s work? “The Khakhar work possibly went for as high as it did because it was so intrinsic to what he himself was about as an artist and was the most important work from him as to its time and period and quality,” said Ashvin Rajagopalan, director of Piramal Art Foundation. “It’s put Khakhar right up there with the rest of the great record-breaking Indian artists.”

In 2016, Khakhar was the subject of a major retrospective at the Tate Modern museum in London, something experts had noted could also be a factor in pushing his demand up.

Other highlights included M F Husain’s Marathi Women which quadrupled its pre-sale estimate to go for $553,000, Ram Kumar’s untitled work which went for $659,000 and Rameshwar Broota’s Anatomy of That Old Story ($537,000).  An untitled F N Souza painting from another owner sold that same evening for $1.5 million. 

While high auction prices do happen from time to time in the art world, they are not common.

“It’s certainly a positive indicator for the Indian art market and it shows how benchmarks are changing for different artists all the time,” said Pundole.