Last year, F N Souza had set a Rs 16.8 crore record for his Man and Woman Laughing at the September Saffronart auction in New Delhi (itself to be broken resoundingly a month later at a Christie's sale in New York). This week, it was the turn of Akbar Padamsee to better that with Rs 19.19 crore for his Greek Landscape at Saffronart's annual evening sale in the city, stealing a lead over many of his Progressive contemporaries and rising to the top ranks among Indian modernists, somewhat unexpectedly upsetting the balance at the top of the pyramid. Souza himself would have been dismayed by such comparisons, but is it time for us to assess Padamsee's market?
The evening sale fetched Padamsee's work a value almost two times that of V S Gaitonde, whose work had a much higher estimate. There was little doubt that the painting was going to do well, and was expected to better his previous peak of Rs 9 crore-plus for Reclining Nude sold by Sotheby's in New York in 2011, and Cityscape by Christie's the following year for an almost similar sum, but that it reached almost the extreme value punters had placed on the 12-ft long painting speaks for the upsets the Indian art market is capable of delivering with outliers outperforming the gilt-edged veterans on grounds of rarity and quality.
All these paintings belong to Padamsee's Grey period of 1959-60 and are highly prized for their lack of colour. "I used black and white and grey because I wanted to understand what colour means," Padamsee said ahead of the auction. "It is a thought process. To construct a painting you have to understand colour, space, object." What Padamsee was experimenting with during this phase was something his peers were bowled over by. M F Husain acquired the work Juhu (subsequently lost), while Krishen Khanna bought Greek Landscape for Rs 1,000 from Bal Chhabda's Gallery 59 in Mumbai, having previously written to Padamsee about being "terribly envious that you had painted such a magnificent painting".
It would be silly to think of Padamsee as an outlier, for he has been a constant performer in the mid-market range, which is where he had been safely placed till outings such as these make a reassessment of his work critical. The 88-year-old artist was born in Mumbai to a Gujarati family and chose to study art, joining Sir JJ School of Art in its third year, and hitching up with Souza's Progressive Artists' Group as an associate. Controversy followed soon after when his painting, Lovers, caused a furore among the city's moral police who had him arrested for obscenity. Padamsee was cleared of all charges by the judge (art critic and collector Rudolf von Leyden speaking in court in his defence) in a landmark judgment in which artistic licence was placed outside the purview of moralising authorities.
It might seem easy to categorise Padamsee, whose oeuvre is entirely dominated by heads and portraits, nudes and landscapes that he refers to as metascapes, most of them in a glowing palette of colours, unlike his eponymous Grey series that has fetched record prices at auctions. Prices for the artist's landscapes, in particular, have been hardening for a while, and there is little doubt that the secondary market will bear the benefit of this demand. What it does mean is that the pecking order in collectors' lists will change as he moves up a couple of notches on their bucket list of must-have artists - an honour that is his due for the consistent quality of his output over a six-and-a-half-decade long career stamped by an expressionistic style that he has owned during this period.
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
