Record sales and a tax break close out blockbuster year for South Asian Modern market – The Art Newspaper

A blockbuster year for the South Asian Modern art market culminated last week with two record-breaking auctions: on 27 September at Saffron Art in New Delhi, 85 lots were sold for $40.2m—the largest single sale that has ever taken place in South Asia—while, on 29 September at Sotheby’s in New York, 54 lots were sold for $25.5m—a record total for a single sale of South Asian art in the West.

These landmark auctions follow Christie’s sale in March of the large mural work Gram Yatra (1954) by the Indian Modernist M.F. Husain for $13.7m, the highest sum ever paid an Indian painting. They also come on the heels of a potentially transformative tax break for art announced in India: last month, sweeping cuts to India’s Goods and Service Tax (GST) have reduced rates on art sales from 12% to 5%.

South Asian art has been on the rise for at least 20 years, with the first $100,000 sale in 2003 and the first $1m sale in 2005. However, it has reached new heights in recent years as more Indian capital pours into the global art market, fuelling dramatic growth in both six- and seven-figure sales. “It was not like this five years ago,” says Charles Moore, director of London’s Grosvenor Gallery. “We’re starting to see the effects of a very strong, recent Indian economy.”

The depth of the present demand is assessed by Minal Vazirani, the president of Saffron Art, who tells The Art Newspaper that in her company’s recording-breaking sale in Delhi on 27 September, seven people bid for the top 10 lots, which all sold for over $1m.

Globally, there are 15 to 20 clients buying South Asian works over $1m, according to Manjari Sihare-Sutin, the co-head of the department at Sotheby’s in New York. This has resulted in “a more stable and sustainable expansion than we’ve seen in the past,” says Nishad Avari, head of South Asian Modern and Contemporary at Christie’s in New York.

A small number of serious collectors have been systematically snapping up the best mid-20th century works; Vazirani puts the number at “about five to six extraordinary collectors who are seeking to institutionalise”. As these buyers fill out private foundations and museums, historically-important works are increasingly being lost to the market forever—which in turn has fuelled intense competition.

Most highly prized are works by the first generation of Modernist painters working in the fertile syncretic milieu of the subcontinent in the decades after independence—in particular, a group of Indian painters of diverse religious and regional identities, working in 1950s Bombay and collectively known as the Progressives. These include Husain, S.H. Raza (record $6.7m), and F.N. Souza, whose record was set $7.5m at Sotheby’s for Houses in Hampstead (1962). At Saffron Art, Souza’s suite of six drawings—Six Gentlemen of Our Times (1955)—sold for $2.3m, making a record for a South Asian work on paper sold at auction.

These soaring prices has funnelled a broader swathe of more amateur collectors to the middle of the market, represented by second-generation artists like Bhupen Khakar, Krishen Khanna, and Ghulam Mohammad Sheikh. “There are not looking at it only from an investment point of view,” Sihare-Sutin says. “They also want to live with it.” 15-20% of buyers are typically new collectors, Avari says. These new buyers are “becoming much more discerning now, and they do their homework.”

Across the board, the number of buyers has increased dramatically. “A lot of it is driven by internal buyers in India,” Moore says. The success of Indian auction-houses like Saffron Art, which was established in 2000, and Pundole’s, founded in 2011, would attest to a high-level broad-based market inside the country: “We had about 200 people in the room in this week’s sale,” Vazirani says. “You don’t see that in the West.”

Asked if the rise of Indian auction-houses threatened Sotheby’s and Christie’s well-established dominance, Avari tells The Art Newspaper “all growth is good, especially since we have many of the same buyers.”

The majority of buyers are still people of Indian origin, living either inside or outside the country, although, as Sihare-Sutin points out, “buyers interested in global Modernism are beginning to make inroads into Indian Modern art.” Progress so far has been slow: “You’re not seeing big American 20th century buyers turning up for a Souza,” Moore says.

Specialists stress that nationalism and identitarianism have not stopped Indians from buying works by Pakistani artists or vice versa. “Recently, we have seen Indian buyers for [the Pakistani artist and writer Anwar Jalal] Shemza and [the Bangladeshi artist] Zainul Abedin,” Sihare-Sutin says. That reflects the fact that mid-20th century artists working in India and in West and East Pakistan were intimately connected, working in similar post-colonial environments and sharing the same disparate global influences.

Large-scale collectors and private foundations in India and Pakistan have made a point of buying across national boundaries: the Pakistani collector Taimur Hassan has amassed a large collection of Indian Modernist art from Calcutta and Santineketan, which will be exhibited at the Royal Academy’s exhibition A Story of South Asian Art later this month, while Kiran Nadar has privately purchased, for example, several large-scale tapestry works by the Pakistani contemporary artist Adeela Suleman for her planned museum in Delhi.

Nevertheless, soaring communalism and geopolitical tension in South Asia have complicated that sort of cross-fertilisation. One Indian art professional, who asked to remain anonymous, tells The Art Newspaper that galleries seeking to import works by Pakistani artists—even ones who are long-dead—have run into trouble with customs officials: “Its nothing like a written regulation,” they say. “Its more about how they choose to apply the rules”. As the UK-based curator Shanay Jhaveri told The Art Newspaper in May, “it could be complicated to stage [an exhibition by a Pakistani artist] in India at the moment”. Over the last 5 years, Indian buyers of Pakistani art “have gone quiet”, Moore says.

And national origin continues to correlate strongly with taste in art. “Records for artists like SM Sultan [from Bangladesh] and Ivan Peries [from Sri Lanka] are being set because those diasporas are becoming more active”, Avari says. The market for Pakistani and Bangladeshi art is much smaller than for Indian works, partly because of the dominance of Indian buyers. “You’ve only got to look at the price records for Pakistani Modernism to see that it is a much smaller group of people,” Moore says. “But there are also artists that break out of that regional collecting habit, like Chughtai and Sadequain.”

Some Bangladeshi artists are becoming increasingly popular with Indian and international buyers: “Interest is growing across the board for the first generation of Bengali artists of the East Pakistan [1947-71] period,” Avari says. Two of the highest prices ever paid for Bangladeshi artworks—an ink sketch and an oil painting by Zainul Abedin, both 1970—were paid at Sotheby’s in London last year by the New York gallery Aicon, which showed them in an exhibition titled Politically Charged, in a nod to the wider political vitality of Abedin’s work in the time of the breaking of empires.

One of the most important factors, according to specialists in London, New York and Delhi, was the increase in cultural and academic attention paid to South Asian art. In London alone, the last year has seen major exhibitions at the Royal Academy, the British Museum, the V&A, the Serpentine Gallery, and two at the Barbican. That exposure naturally increases commercial interest, but it also stems from an abundance of collecting capital: “Private institutions are very good at loaning, and they sponsor the curatorial expertise,” said Moore. That will be in evidence, when the RA exhibition opens on 28 October.