Despite global exhibitions and a small number of international collectors, for a long time it was the general perception of most Westerners that Indian art was at worst mere pastiches of European art and at best local, small-time, folk art, lacking real dialectic, dimension or intellectual weight. Christie’s wrote an essay to market Indian art & prepared a sale during the 1990s, but it was to be a failure.
However, at the beginning of the new millennium, the global art scene changed, with the rise of the so-called ‘emerging art markets’: notably Chinese, Russian and Indian. This last ten years demonstrate a international modern and contemporary indian art market boom with major sales in all the worlds sale room including London, New York and Hong Kong.
One major significant change in the market place was that Indian art had for a long time been bought almost entirely by Indian collectors (mainly based outside India), but now Indian art was being collected by non-Indians. More than this, these increased value of sales demonstrated the enormous growth in global interest. In the mid 1990s, no Indian contemporary painting had sold at auction for more than £50,000 (when contemporary European and American works work selling for millions) but now the top artists were fetching seven-figure sums.
Since launching regular Indian modern art sales in New York in 2000, worldwide sales in this category at Christie’s, for example, saw an exponential increase from US$660,000 to over US$45 million by 2008.
National & international interest was reborn in the senior established artists with emphasis on the Progressive Artists Group, that Raza had been a founder of. Though dissolved in 1956, it was profoundly influential in changing the idiom of Indian art. Almost all India’s major artists in the 1950s were associated with the group: K H Ara, S K Bakre, H A Gade, M F Husain, F N Souza and of course Raza. A few who spring immediately to mind are Bal Chabda, V. S. Gaitonde, Krishen Khanna, Ram Kumar, Tyeb Mehta, Devender Singh, Akbar Padamsee, Himmat Shah and Manjit Bawa.
Artists such as Raza had been pivotally important in the gradual propagation of Indian art, not just in the last ten years but over a long period of time. His works were shown in prestigious galleries and institutional venues in Europe and beyond: when, in1952, he had his first show in Paris, a joint show with F N Souza and Akbar Padamsee, both fellow members of the Progressive Artists’ Group, major collectors, such as Mme Elie de Rothschild, bought his work. Novelist Andre Maurois & Jacques Lassaigne, who later became director of Musée d’Art Moderne purchased works by him in his 1953 show.
That he gained signal success in a country as nationalistic and introverted as France was a triumph in itself. He was the first non-Frenchman to win the coveted Prix de la Critique (in 1956), as result of which he was offered shows in Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Canada and USA.
In 1982, the Festival of India at the Royal Academy in London presented the work of the fifteen most important Indian painters, including Raza. Three years later, the show Artistes Indiens en France at the Fondation Nationale des Arts Plastiques in Paris had one room devoted to Amrita Shergil and twelve works by Raza. Shortly after this, Dominique Bozo, Director of the Centre Pompidou and founder of the Musee Picasso, travelled to India to select seven Indian painters who had not been included in the 1985 show for an exhibition at the Centre Pompidou.
In 1995, Le Monde de l’Art gallery in the rue Paradis, in Paris, hosted one of the most important exhibitions of Indian art since the 1985 show: seven painters were represented, including Raza.
As is often the case, émigré artists form a worldwide following more easily than others who stay in their own country: Raza, Husain and Anish Kapoor. Compare the most famous Russian artists, whom many scarcely even think of as being Russian, so absorbed were they into their country of adoption: Rothko, Kandinsky, Chagall, Soutine. The difference is that Raza has remained much closer to his roots.
The recent global economic crisis has seen a predictable and rational adjustment, as in all the emerging markets (Chinese, Russian, Islamic, Korean etc) and a more calculated purchasing strategy among private and corporate buyers and the plethora of private and corporate speculators and art investment funds in India and elsewhere. What we are witnessing now are more judicious and discerning marketing, purchasing and investment policies. Established ‘blue-chip’ artists, such as Raza, have seen stability and even growth – one of Raza’s paintings, La Terre (1973), sold for £1.three million in London at Christies, June 2008 beating his world record for Tapovan, 1972 which sold for $1.5 million in 2006 in Sotheby’s sales rooms in New York.
Old age has now caught up with the old masters of the modern art of India. Raza is 87 years old, M F Husain is 94 and the Goan artist F N Souza is 85. Akbar Padamsee is also 81 years old. They have spawned a new generation of rising stars, working in varied media and attracting global interest: for instance, Subodh Gupta, Sanjay Bhattacharya, Bose Krishnamachari, Geeta Vadhera, Devajyoti Ray, Vagaram Choudhary and Bikash Bhattacharya.
