The Akbar Padamsee that is on the cover of Saffronart's forthcoming auction catalogue hung for years on the dining room wall of Krishen Khanna's house in Gurgaon, a work he was immensely proud of and would point out to first-time visitors. The artist had acquired it from Bal Chhabda's Gallery 59 in 1979 for Rs 1,000 while still working with Grindlay's Bank in Kanpur, following which he wrote to Padamsee: "My dear Akbar, I might as well be frank - I was terribly envious that you had painted such a magnificent painting." Along with its impeccable provenance, the painting is among the artist's best career works and carries an estimate of Rs 7-9 crore. Should it start off a war among bidders, there's every likelihood it will fetch the artist a high record price, and be counted among the more expensive Indian paintings to sell at an auction.
The Christie's catalogue has a V S Gaitonde on the cover, a work that was shown at its preview in India, and which was on display at the artist's retrospective at the Guggenheim in 2014-15, again pointing to its impeccable credentials (it belonged to Homi J Bhabha, and was recently in the Darashaw collection). At $1.8-2.2 million (Rs 12-14.7 crore), it remains to be seen whether it too will break previous Gaitonde records, all of them held by the auction house so far, the last of which ($4.38 million or Rs 29.4 crore at current value) is also the highest price for any Indian painting.
Cover lots can be a tricky bet - to go with popular choice, the most expensive, or the idiosyncratic - and auction houses, predictably, play it safe. The Padamsee is not the most expensive work in the Saffronart catalogue (Gaitonde is, with an estimate of Rs 10-15 crore), but the auction house knows that the interest in a potential record-breaking Padamsee will create more buzz than the safe but tested Gaitonde. Christie's opted for the safer Gaitonde when it has a richness of Razas in its sale, and interest in the artist is high, given his recent death - however morbid that sounds.
Both auctions have managed to get a fair share of attractive properties, but news on the street is that, increasingly, works to auction are getting more difficult for the acquisition teams in auction houses. More and more people are holding on to rare or prized properties, and the more mainstream works don't attract the required attention. A few prized lots, therefore, are almost essential to pull in eyeballs and open purse strings. Take M F Husain, for instance. He was so prolific that his works continue to fetch up in the market, to be routinely traded, but very few of them are of exceptional quality. As a result, his prices have remained frozen for a while, whereas the artist has the potential to do far better should these come up for sale. (It is also a truism that exceptional values boost the overall market for an artist.) The Saffronart catalogue has one such Husain at Rs 3-5 crore, so it will be worth seeing how much it commands at the fall of the gavel.
Till 2008, the contemporary market did well too, so there was a greater diversity in the range of artists who were auctioned. But with the decline of the contemporary market, auction houses were left with only the moderns, as a result of which there was a sense of boredom among buyers with the same names being turned around as auction houses hedged their bets. With the current catalogue, Christie's has put together a greater selection of contemporaries than in the past in order to widen its market base. Its results will be worth watching.
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
