Delhi Art Gallery’s current show, “The Printed Picture: Four Centuries of Indian Printmaking”, is an exhibition layered with many levels of irony. The irony is not in the show itself, which is a straightforward exposition of the history of the genre in India, but in how it serves to lay bare the inherent paradox in print-making as a form of fine art. The question — is print-making a fine art form? — may seem sacrilegious given the many fine print-makers practising today, but it is inscribed into the very origin of print-making as a mode of mechanically reproducing images.
Print-making came to India sometime in the mid-18th century — the result of the imperialising British’s desire to show off to people back home the riches and strangenesses of the land they were then on the verge of conquering. So itinerant artists such as Tilly Kettle, Thomas and William Daniell, FB Solvyns, Edward Lear (yes, the nonsense versifier), and a few East India Company officials such as Robert Grindlays (who returned to England and founded the bank) painted/sketched the monuments, people and topography, that were then made into lithographs, handtinted etchings, acquatints, metal engravings and so on, and compiled into books.
The DAG exhibition has several of these, including a 2 feet by nearly 9 feet long depiction of “The Glorious Conquest of Seringapatnam” (1803) by Robert Ker Porter. Within a century, however, scores of print studios had come up in Calcutta, Bombay and Lahore (primarily) which adopted/adapted this “colonial import”, churning out prints depicting gods, goddesses and eminent persons like Raja Ram Mohun Roy, or mis-en-scenes from mythology, history or literature, in the indigenous pat or miniature painting styles. These were used to illustrate calendars, books and magazines. Later, self-conscious artists like Raja Ravi Varma made oleographic prints of their paintings as a way of shoring up their income by reaching out to a wider market.
| THE GRAPHIC ECOSYSTEM |
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Ironically, by the early 20th century, lithography, etching, engraving, etc — which were labour-intensive and hands-on — were becoming obsolete with new and cheaper technologies such as offset printing. It was around this time that print-making entered the realm of the fine arts. To elucidate — while prints earlier reproduced images that were originally paintings or sketches, the printmaker artists now drew directly “on the matrix”, that is, the block of wood (linocut) or stone (lithography) or sheet of metal (etching, engraving, etc) that were then passed through the press to make prints. Since the 1940s or so, India has produced a long line of consummate printmaker artists — Chittaprosad, Haren Das (both subjects of recent retrospective shows at DAG), Jagmohan Chopra, Jyoti Bhatt, Anupam Sud, and more recently Dattatraya Apte, Anandamay Banerjee, Shukla Sawant et al. Krishna Reddy is the most distinguished name here — the 87-year-old renowned print-maker, who migrated to Europe in the ’50s and now lives in the US, was director of the legendary Atelier 17 in Paris and is credited with pioneering the “viscosity printing” process which allows artists to make multi-colour prints from a single matrix. DAG has several of his works ranged on one wall.
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Paradoxically, however, the market for graphic prints never developed in India. Unlike in the West, there are no galleries dedicated to print-making, exhibitions of just contemporary print-makers are few and far between, and only a handful of collectors like the Kolkata-based Pradip Bothra, whose large collection, acquired recently by DAG, form a large segment of the displays.
And this despite the fact that prints are generally priced low — starting at Rs 10,000 or even lower — and galleries could well have drawn them into their “affordable art” push. Even installations, videos, and performance which are far more difficult to display, and sell less, presumably, for the same reason, get better billing. At DAG, average prices are around Rs 50,000, although there are some rare works that cost a few lakhs. Even at auctions, prints fetch very poor prices — at the Editions 24-Hour Auction by Saffronart last May, for instance, a Krishna Reddy print went for Rs 115,058, the same price as a Somenath Hore lithography. A portfolio of six etchings by Zarina Hashmi went for Rs 3.45 lakh, while a set of two lithographs by Nasreen Mohamadi for Rs 3.70 lakh and three lithographs by the Progressive master V S Gaitonde for a somewhat higher price, between Rs 1.15 lakh and Rs 1.87 lakh.
Paula Sengupta, the print-maker-art historian who put together the DAG show and also wrote the accompanying tome, says that both artists and galleries must share the blame for this. The printmakers of the pre- and post-independent decades, unlike the painters and sculptors, feels Sengupta, were “spending all their energies in taming the colonial medium to Indian circumstances” rather than in “expressing conceptual developments”. The galleries, on the other hand, she says, didn’t come up with a marketing strategy that would work for prints, where each print in a limited edition is priced low but the gallery ends up making as much, or more, from the entire tranche. No wonder, many artists who began as print-makers switched to painting and sculpture — Somenath Hore, Sanat Kar, Lalu Shaw, Paramjit Singh, etc.
The finally paradox is, of course, that prices of limited edition signed serigraphs (a form of silk-screen prints) of paintings by star artists such as M F Husain, Jehangir Sabavala and S H Raza regularly fetch comparable, or higher prices.
For instance, at Art Bull’s sping auction this year, around five serigraphs of Husain fetched between Rs 1.1 lakh and Rs 1.5 lakh, while a Krishna Reddy went for Rs 2 lakh and a Somenath Hore print from his important “Wound Series” (estimate Rs 4 lakh-Rs 5 lakh) remained unsold. “It’s a result of ignorance on the part of buyers. Most people feel that if it’s work of art it has to be on canvas. Sculptures come second, and graphics last,” says Siddharth Tagore of Art Bull.
