Jehangir Sabavala - Indian Art News

Indian Modernist masterpieces to go under the hammer at Christie’s auction in New York

visionsart — Wed, 30 Aug 2017 08:48:00 +0000

Spanning more than 70 years of modern and contemporary art in South Asia, the sale features seminal works, led by artist V.S. Gaitonde, among many others.

Akbar Padamsee, Untitled (Mirror Image), Lot 424. Estimate: $600,000-800,000 Image Courtesy: Christie’s.

At Christie’s Asian Art Week, works by artists, including Vasudeo S. Gaitonde, Tyeb Mehta, Adi Davierwalla, Akbar Padamsee, Jehangir Sabavala, Ganesh Pyne, Manjit Bawa, and others, will go under the hammer at the South Asian Modern + Contemporary art auction in Rockefeller Center.

Manjit Bawa, Untitled (Krishna and Cow), Lot 475. Image Courtesy: Christie’s. Estimate: $350,000-500,000.

The auction will offer a total of 76 lots led by an important work painted by Vasudeo S. Gaitonde (1924-2001) in 1996. ‘Untitled’ (Lot 414) is an incandescent painting from 1996; while immediately striking, it maintains the restrained balance of light, texture, colour, and space that the artist perfected over the course of his career.

VS Gaitonde, Untitled *1996). Image Courtesy: Christie’s. Estimate: $2,800,000-3,500,000.

Against a ground methodically layered in tones of vermillion, orange and yellow, Gaitonde inscribes a series of enigmatic hieroglyphic forms that seem almost like embers scorched into the translucent surface, pulsating with a unique meaning for each viewer (estimate: $2,800,000-3,500,000).An advocate of Zen Buddhism, Gaitonde saw painting as a spiritual endeavour and not something to be rushed, either in conception or execution. He painted, on average, just five or six canvases a year.

Maqbool Fida Husain, Untitled, Lot 452, Estimate: $200,000-300,000
The auction will take place September 13 at Christie’s, 20 Rockefeller Center, New York, 10 am.
Credits – https://www.architecturaldigest.in/content/indian-modernist-masterpieces-go-hammer-christies-auction-new-york/#s-cust0

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Christie’s bids for another high in Indian art market

visionsart — Wed, 08 Oct 2014 12:41:00 +0000

SummaryChristie’s first auction in Mumbai in 2013 was a phenomenal success, establishing the highest price for a work of art ever sold in India.

Jehangir Sabavala’s The Green Cape, oil on canvas, painted in 1974, is likely to fetch between R1.2 crore and R1.8 crore.

Jehangir Sabavala’s The Green Cape, oil on canvas, painted in 1974, is likely to fetch between R1.2 crore and R1.8 crore.

When London-based auction house Christie’s holds its second auction in Mumbai on December 11, it will be capitalising on a market that it shook up last year. Christie’s first auction in Mumbai in 2013 was a phenomenal success, establishing the highest price for a work of art ever sold in India, and the total sale of R96,59,37,500 was double the pre-sale expectations.

Some recent successful sales by Indian auction houses have just reinforced the fact that good art will attract buyers and better prices. For instance, an auction by Delhi-based Saffronart last month sold 83 artworks for over R38 crore in one evening, apart from a Jehangir Sabavala painting for R3 crore.

An online auction of modern and contemporary art by Indian artists, including MF Husain, SH Raza and Anjolie Ela Menon, raised R20 crore last month. In the auction conducted by AstaGuru.com, Raza’s work, titled Bhoomi, sold for R5.3 crore.

However, are high values for Indian art and successful sales here to stay?

Christie’s international director of Asian art Amin Jaffer certainly thinks so. Positive about this year’s auction too, he says early indications are for strong results once again. In an email response to FE, he promises Christie’s will have a good selection, particularly of works by modern masters. Giving details, he says the auction house already has a sublime landscape by Sabavala from 1974, The Green Cape, with a pre-sale estimate of R1.2-1.8 crore and a rare Tyeb Mehta portrait. Other artists include Bhupen Khakhar, Subodh Gupta, Rashid Rana, Mithu Sen, Bharti Kher, Nilima Sheikh and Thukral & Tagra.

Seeing last year’s response, Christie’s has decided to make the sale an annual affair in India. As Jaffer says, “We are committed to the Indian market for the long term. We have had a presence in India for 20 years but feel the time is right to make our auctions part of the art calendar, alongside other initiatives that will ensure a vibrant and sustainable future for the art market in India.”

Kishore Singh, head, publications & exhibitions, Delhi Art Gallery, says everyone is waiting and watching for Christie’s second auction that will truly define the market for Indian art. “The first auction was a superb collection of artworks and had the entire might of Christie’s behind it. Let’s see if the second auction matches it in terms of quality and value.” He terms the first auction an ‘aberration’, saying only sustained success will help the Indian market, especially unestablished artists. He also points out that no phenomenal sales of Indian art happened globally immediately after the auction in India. However, with recent successful auctions, he predicts the value of Indian art to go up to R100 crore by end of the decade. If that’s not success, what is?

Ivinder Gill | New Delhi | Published: Oct 08 2014

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Jehangir Sabavala’s world was deceptively serene

visionsart — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 07:12:00 +0000

Ranjit Hoskote, TNN | Sep 3, 2011, 07.06AM IST

Jehangir Sabavala invoked, in many of his landscapes, a homeland lost to historical vagaries and recoverable only in dream. It was easy for us, as viewers, to be seduced by the beauty of this imagined homeland: To lose ourselves among its windswept strands, crystalline lakes and cloud-hidden mountains. What called us back to an engagement with the anguish and uncertainty of this deceptively serene world was the figure, which, in Sabavala’s art, was often the exile crossing wastelands in quest of anchorage; the solitary pilgrim following an elusive star; or the sorcerer conjuring up new geographies of forest and stream in defiance of the brutality of circumstance.

During the last ten years, and certainly following the lifetime retrospective of his work at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai and Delhi (2005-2006), Sabavala has come to be identified with the gracious ease of success. But success had not, in fact, come easily to him. Through the 1970s, and later in the 1990s, he had been charged with being an elitist painter dedicated to romantic evocations of alternative worlds, out of touch with what some of his contemporaries were pleased to regard as the ‘real India’. Fortunately, these criticisms have been set in perspective as the strength and relevance of Sabavala’s art have become more apparent.

To paint as Sabavala did was not to be escapist, a charge routinely levelled at him during the 1970s, but to address the human predicament in a manner that dramatised the paradoxical vulnerability and resilience of the individual. It was a situation that the artist knew well. He was a member of the heroic first generation of postcolonial Indian artists, who turned their gaze, trained in the academies and ateliers of Paris, to a newly emancipated society in need of sustaining myths. These artists were prepared to commit themselves to an uncertain future because they believed that art could transfigure experience, restore a lost dimension of awareness to everyday life, and to transmit subliminal realities into the domain of consciousness.

In addressing their own dilemmas as well as those of their compatriots, the artists of Sabavala’s generation did not simply create a new set of pictorial languages. They also took up a specific stance towards the role of art in relation to social transformation. Some, like M F Husain, became the playful chroniclers of the great Indian narrative of transformation. Others, like Tyeb Mehta, dedicated themselves to the creation of archetypal images that spoke of the cataclysms of a society divided against itself. And Sabavala, over the six decades of his painterly career, chose to develop and deepen a body of images that had close linkages with the thrum of the subcontinent yet opened up vistas of reverie and meditative silence.

Through the 1950s, he worked to make his paintings legible to his viewers, adapting the Cubism of his Paris training to the harsh light, the bright colours and the visual hyper-abundance of India. Through the 1960s, when he made his breakthrough discovery of what I have elsewhere called the visionary landscape, he bestowed on the rivers and mountains of India an ‘auratic’ radiance, an otherness that liberated them from the regime of time. And through the 1970s and 1980s, as his palette grew more muted and austere, he seemed to be responding to a history of loss by evoking the elements as the ultimate home of the homeless. The sky, during his paintings of the 1990s, is the wanderer’s chosen roof. In many ways, the expansiveness of Sabavala’s paintings during the last 20 years reflects the compelling 360-degree awareness that he exhibited.

To be a painter, for Sabavala, was never to be the resident of an ivory tower. He believed that the life of the studio should constantly be replenished by encounter with the broader currents of society and culture. In conversation, he was constantly and genuinely attentive to the lives and practices of others, whether they were artists, poets, critics, architects, politicians, gallerists, or auction-house professionals. The world, to him, was not only a reservoir of images; it was also a place to be enjoyed for its music of surprise and revelation.

Similarly, his acute knowledge of the secondary and tertiary art market did not grow from a fascination with the market as a source of opportunities; rather, the market was a theatre of impulses and outcomes for him, to be analysed and enjoyed for its own sake. If Sabavala has ever wanted a motto, he would perhaps have chosen Socrates’ dictum, ‘The unexamined life is not worth living.’ And life, to him, was not confined to the breath of a singular self, but stood for the complex polyphony of a society understood in all its amplitude, which made the existence of that individual self worthwhile. This awareness will be his lasting gift to those of us who had the privilege of knowing him.

In the ’40s when he was at JJ School of Arts, his drawings were framed. They were very realistic academic studies which we were told to look at carefully. He often used to exhibit in Bombay. I remember going for his shows. He had a cubist way of conceiving an image. It remained with him for all his life. He had a kind of meditative approach to his medium-the way he would apply paint and conceive a figure. There was a controlled manner in which he approached subject matter and a certain serenity and balance that one saw in his work. – Atul Dodiya

He was an immensely kind individual. Besides his unforgettable elegance, something I will always carry within me is the many conversations we’ve had about new media and installation art, etc. Despite the fact that his own work had very little to do with these developments, he was always curious about where contemporary art was headed. – Jitish Kallat

He was a definite guide. Till date, I had been consulting him regularly on matters of art and my work. What I admired was the artisanal quality of his painting. Sabavala worked in a small studio. The way he laid out his colours before he started painting was something I admired. And I tried to have that quality, tried to be as organized. I used to admire the monochromatic underpainting. Then he would glaze it. This is an old technique that was used in a contemporary way by him. The old masters did it. – Mehlli Gobhai

He was an artist who was passionately committed to his vision. He lived through times when the concept of art had changed dramatically. But he was never swayed away from his own central vision. He was extremely generous in his willingness to talk to younger artists, to give his comments on their work. – Gieve Patel

He was a senior painter whose contribution to modern Indian art was noteworthy. I am saddened to learn of his demise, my condolences to his family and the art fraternity who will greatly miss him. – SH Raza

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Two art auctions next week could heat up the market

visionsart — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 08:21:00 +0000

Kishore Singh

In 2007, when a Mumbai-based art gallery released a set of 18 limited edition serigraphs of painter Jehangir Sabavala, the sceptics among collectors sniggered about what they perceived as manipulation of prices.

In the time the exhibition-cum-sale moved from Mumbai to Delhi, the prices of the smaller of the serigraph prints (16’x24.4′) had escalated from Rs 45,000 to Rs 90,000 each, and the larger prints (24.4’x33.6′) had jumped from Rs 75,000 to Rs 1,50,000 each. If you bought the entire set, you might therefore have paid Rs 8 lakh in Mumbai, and a little later, Rs 13.5 lakh in Delhi.

This year, one such set was auctioned by Bonham’s for Rs 26 lakh. And now, another set is on offer at the June 15 auction of Bid & Hammer in Bangalore, where the estimate value of Rs 22-24 lakh might well be comfortably breached. It is this careful sourcing of art works that marks the auction company’s bid for respectability.

Badly scorched at its debut auction a few months back, Bid & Hammer this time has paid considerably more attention to its lots, choosing between well-established artists as well as quality works by those less well known. More importantly, it has based estimates on a realistic, perhaps even the low-end of the scale.

A Thota Vaikuntam oil on canvas, arguably only 8’x7′, is estimated at a laughable Rs 35,000 to Rs 50,000.

The coming week has another auction on the anvil — that of online auction house Saffronart — on June 18-19. And the most excitement among collectors is being generated for works by MF Husain, who has been cleared of obscenity charges against him in India.

Though the artist has not yet risked his return to the country, the Saffronart auction should see a major swing in his works, paralleling his own life.

In all, 140 lots of modern and contemporary works are on offer, and though many of the by-now predictable names are out in force (F N Souza, S H Raza, Ram Kumar, Akbar Padamsee, J Swaminathan, Jogen Chowdhury, Laxma Goud and Krishen Khanna), interesting inclusions are Manjit Bawa (collectors are holding on to the artist’s works while he lies in coma, hoping for an escalation in their value), Phaneendra Nath Chaturvedi, Chitra Ganesh, Gopikrishna, Farhad Hussain and Vivan Sundaram.

The Saffronart auction will be keenly watched to see which way prices go, especially since international interest in Indian art has continued to uphold values. Even though they might not be escalating as sharply as before, Indian artists, those living or deceased, have continued to set higher individual records at auctions of their works.

This was certainly so in London where, last month, Sotheby’s realised $8.4 million from a sale of modern and contemporary Indian art, setting as many as 11 individual record highs for artists Akbar Padamsee, F N Souza, Subodh Gupta (for a work on canvas), Bharti Kher, Rabindranath Tagore, Jitish Kallat and others. “Indian art,” said Zara Porter-Hill, head of Indian art at Sotheby’s, “continues to prosper – it’s a market on the move.”

June rang up in London when 19th century wash views on Coonoor and Darjeeling in India painted by explorer artist Edward Lear opened the month. At the time of writing, an exhibition of 32 works from the private collection of Tina and Anil Ambani has just been shown by Christie’s.

The auction house has also consigned 12 works from Tina Ambani’s Harmony Art Foundation for auction, as part of its sale of South Asian modern and contemporary art where the stars of the show are old favourites F N Souza and Tyeb Mehta.

For news of how the Christie’s auction went, watch this space. Else, there are always the serigraphs next week – henceforth let no one tell you only “original” works have resale value.

For news of how the Christie’s auction went, watch this space. Else, there are always the serigraphs next week — henceforth let no one tell you only “original” works have resale value.

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