Modernists, minimalists and rare

V S Gaitonde and Tyeb Mehta painted sparingly, which is why their prices reflect their lack of market availability

Taking visitors around the new wing of the National Gallery of Modern Art, I am no longer surprised at their exclamations of awe when viewing the works of two of India’s premier modernists who – alas – have been almost marginalised by the media. Apart from their near-reclusive quality, Rockefeller fellowships and a spartan quantity of output, they had little in common, but their importance as the first tier of modernists who re-wrote the rules of painting in India, remains integral to the study of art in the country.

 

While they did live to see their work acknowledged, it is posthumously that both V S Gaitonde and Tyeb Mehta will get their due — the former with a show that will mark Saffronart’s long-awaited debut in New Delhi, the latter with an exhibition at Vadehra Art Gallery, also in the capital. While Mehta is better known for breaching the ceiling with a Rs1.5 crore sale at Christie’s in 2002 that paved the way for other Indian artists to follow (and rapidly overtake) his price and trigger an art boom, Gaitonde has remained a more peripheral figure because his abstract works – better known as “that yellow work” or “that brown work”, for their bare restraint – are somewhat more difficult to comprehend, or eulogise, in print.

Gaitonde, a Goan by birth, was born in Maharashtra, but lived in New Delhi; Mehta, born in Gujarat, was brought up and lived in Mumbai. Both pursued their careers on a foundation of personal sacrifices — yet, neither painted prolifically to overcome that handicap. Instead, Mehta was severely critical of his own work, often destroying what he had completed, and sometimes “borrowing back” works he had sold, to improve upon them, or to tear them up and replace them with a new work for the collector. Unlike most painters, Mehta’s later period saw him flowering with his trussed bulls and rickshaw pullers, his Falling Figures and iconic Santiniketan, Kali and Mahishasura series.

Gaitonde, on the other hand, was a meticulous painter and slow to a fault. Probably India’s most celebrated abstractionist – a term he deplored, preferring to label his works as “non-objective” – he brought an elegant sparseness to his works, though the minimalism was achieved through a complicated process of layering with a roller blade and knife. Because his works were invariably untitled, it became as difficult to describe them as to ascribe a form or emotive experience to them, making them difficult to reproduce in print for the consumption of mass readers. This has been the reason for Gaitonde’s near-anonymity in a public increasingly sensitive to concerns of art, though collectors have always sought out his canvases.

A Rs92 lakh sale at Osian’s set the bar for Gaitonde, which subsequent Saffronart auctions hijacked with a Rs1.47 crore sale in winter 2010 in what is seen as a recovering market, matching a similar price (Rs1.49 crore) for a smaller work exactly a year earlier. At the same time, a smaller canvas had fetched roughly half that value, and for those unable to afford his big-ticket prices, an ink on paper drawing fetched Rs10 lakh.

Mehta, of course, has fared better, his art considered more “accessible” for being figurative — though he too painted with a sparseness that seemed to consist of sharp lines and bisecting diagonals. Earlier works with a more expressionistic vocabulary, therefore, failed to fetch the headline-grabbing prices of his more familiar oeuvre. Works from the sixties, auctioned by Saffronart in winter ‘09 (Rs53 lakh) and autumn 2010 (Rs83 lakh) compare poorly against his Kali (summer 2007, Rs3.95 crore), while untitled works but with his defining brushstrokes and familiar figures managed Rs2.29 crore (winter ‘07), Rs4.75 crore (winter ‘06), and compared with Gaitonde’s ink on paper, grabbed Rs17 lakh for a work of charcoal on paper (winter ‘09).

The two exhibitions in New Delhi will focus on the two modernists, but works on sale, hard to find in their own lifetimes, are rarer still, and will likely soar beyond the 15 per cent forecast as year-on-year increases for artists of, particularly, the Progressive Artists’ Goup and its associates, who both defined the modern movement as well as upheld its ideology as vanguards.

These views are personal and do not reflect those of the organisation with which the writer is associated.

kishoresingh_22@hotmail.com