EG: I stand by that. Indians are primarily buyers. Indian clients start with items of cultural heritage, transition into luxury categories such as jewellery and watches and then trophy pieces like impressionist and modern paintings. There has been a five-fold increase in Indian buyers in 2015 in the jewellery and impressionist-modern categories.
EG: If you look at a five-year span from 2010-2015, Indian buyers have bought and bid $400 million in jewellery alone in our global sales. Some look for stones, others for heirlooms and yet others shop for weddings. There is no typical buyer but they are very active in the top end and are driving global sales.
YM: There have been multi-million-dollar prices for the modernists like V S Gaitonde, S H Raza etc. Even mid-career artists are getting more visibility. There’s a collector in Ohio who is going to showcase Sudarshan Shetty, Subodh Gupta and Bharti Kher at the Pizzuti museum later this year. Nasreen Mohamedi is having a show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new space which was formerly the Whitney. It’s such a coup that this brand new space will open with an Indian artist. Come summer, Bhupen Khakar will be featured at the Tate. So Indian artists are beginning to be shown in new places.
EG: You have to scale the mountain every time. But it’s a challenge we relish. We are like hunter-gatherers, looking for trophies, and the next cover lot. This time we’re very fortunate, and we have sourced a Gaitonde for the South Asia sale in March that’s become a talking point.
YM: It’s the largest work he’s ever done on canvas, and was initially done for Air India. It has that airy feel, and a sense of space and eternity. It eventually didn’t go to Air India and ended up with another artist-collector called Bal Chhabra who supported many of these artists. Chhabra parted with works like Raza’s Maa but this was the one piece that he didn’t want to part with in his lifetime.
The miniature market is extremely buoyant. In October 2015, the collection of a Londoner, Sven Gahlin, which included many miniatures went on sale. It was a 95% sell-through rate. There are a lot of new buyers from India. We see some collectors of modern and contemporary looking at it seriously as they expand their collections to the classical period. It’s a niche area and the quality is fabulous. Compared with other areas of the global art market, they do represent very good value for money.
YM: As people are travelling and becoming more global in their mindset, you’ll have all kinds of eclecticism in collecting. Even here you can have a home that looks completely western in its decor or completely traditional or a mix of both. So you have people who have an M F Husain and a Damien Hirst on their walls. There are several Indian collectors who buy top names in western art like Picasso and Van Gogh.