Pretty to a fault

Buyer’s favourites are not necessarily collector’s choices, but a few artists have bucked the trend.

Artists’ works fall into many categories. Some may be simplistic (landscapes, for instance, or figurative), or based on a certain period (modern applies to anyone born post-1900, while contemporaries include those born post-1947), or according to schools (Bengal, known for its “romantic” style; or Baroda, identified by an intellectual edginess), but when artists cut across genres, styles and schools, it becomes difficult to label them in any one group when they could just as easily belong to another.

For a variety of reasons, critics have tended to look down upon what they deprecatingly refer to as “decorative art”, which includes any work where aesthetics are given prominence. Buyers (as opposed to collectors) tend to lap up these works over others that depict violence, or gore because, as any consultant worth her salt will tell you, such works aren’t vastu-compliant. But some so-called decorative artists who have worn down the resistance of critics because their work has stood the test of time include Manjit Bawa, Anjolie Ela Menon, Satish Gujral and Paresh Maity.

 

In the seventies and eighties, Manjit Bawa was the toast of New Delhi and attracted society ladies to his studio as much for his Sufi persona as for his music and cooking. His paintings were both central and incidental to his charisma, and pleasing enough to become paid-up members of his charmed circle. As his flat tonal palette and mystical figures of gods, animals and men became familiar, collectors joined the throng and by the nineties a healthy secondary market had begun to emerge. Failing health and an accident in the new century saw many of those works disappear from circulation as people began to hoard them for gain rather than pleasure. Recent auctions have shown that this faith was not misplaced — Bawa sells well over his auction estimates, often at twice the higher estimate, as when an Untitled work depicting a man astride two galloping horses fetched Rs 2.8 crore at a Sotheby’s auction in New York in March 2010. Last month, a smaller work, a self portrait, fetched Rs 1.3 crore at the Christie’s auction in London.

Anjolie Ela Menon has yet to cross the crore threshold — her highest tally has been Rs 67 lakh at a Christie’s auction — but like Bawa, serious collectors had given her short shrift for being “too pretty”. Though her canvases have an air of charm, there is also a sense of disquiet not quite bordering on malfeasance. Even her nudes have a quality of allure spun around cosy domesticity and, therefore, unlikely to embarrass the collector’s family. In recent times, Menon has been heard saying that she is holding on to her works (on her accountant’s say) to create a sense of scarcity, which could put pressure on her prices and cause them to rise. But with enough works, and Menon in good health, returns are likely to be steady rather than heady.

In some senses, Paresh Maity has continued where Manjit Bawa left off. He is conscious of his own marketing and packaging, complete from moving in the right circles to keeping himself in the news — most recently for his 800-ft (that’s a quarter kilometre long) painting, The Indian Odyssey, at New Delhi’s recently inaugurated T3 terminal, which must necessarily be his most expensive work. He is young enough not to have made too much of a mark in secondary sales yet, and his auction record of Rs 30 lakh at Sotheby’s for The Gate has been bested at primary sales at galleries. But the surge will follow as works tend to increase in the secondary market.

Satish Gujral’s aesthetic sheen tends to overwhelm to the point of subjugating the subject itself. Insiders point to the designer mafia, in part invented by himself, for a claustrophobic hold on his works. Gujral’s circle of friends who bought his works and cloned his lifestyle have caused as much damage as his own architectural practice in the eighties and nineties when the homes he designed were also filled with his own paintings and sculpture; and his family in allied professions chose to showcase his work almost exclusively, thereby creating a stultified image for his paintings. His high profile in Delhi’s party circuit but low profile in secondary sales has kept prices from escalating — the highest reported sale being Rs 28 lakh at both Sotheby’s and Christie’s.

Another artist who set out as a member of this select group was Sanjay Bhattacharya. Though he began dizzyingly, he failed to rise beyond the nostalgia-seeped spatial space that he kept repeating till his market collapsed on itself, and recent attempts to resurrect it with an edgier sense of experimentation with other mediums has been less than successful. Nor have his prices matched the confidence of the art market proving what critics have been fond of saying: that art needs to be more than just pretty if it has to survive.

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

kishoresingh_22@hotmail.com