A work by Vasudeo S. Gaitonde has, once again, broken the record for an Indian artist at auction after his 1961 painting from the collection of the dancer Aditi Mangaldas made £3.9m (with fees) at SaffronArt in Mumbai. This comes just six months after he last made this record.
SaffronArt’s sale, which also achieved the highest price for the Baroda Group painter N.S. Bendre, marked the first major auction of Modern and contemporary South Asian art since a promising September season. This led to high hopes for this week’s Asia Week New York auctions at Sotheby’s and Christie’s.
Sotheby’s sold another Gaitonde work—a fresh-to-auction 1962 painting from the collection of Robert Marshak, a US physicist who helped develop the atomic bomb. The painting brought in $1.9m (with fees) against a high estimate of $1.2m. Several lots later, an austere Akbar Padamsee landscape nearly quadrupled its low estimate of $250,000 to make $927,5000 (with fees). In total 93 out of 101 (92%) lots sold, bringing in $7.1m—more than double the sale’s $3.3m low estimate—and a nearly 50% increase from last year.
Records were set for seven artists, several of whom, such as Sunayani Devi and Manishi Dey, come from the Bengal School. Interest from art historians and institutions in this early 20th-century group of Indian nationalist artists has surged in the past decade, with prices steadily rising in tandem.
The head of sale Manjari Sihare-Sutin attributes Sotheby’s continued success in the category in part to a policy of introducing approximately five to 10 new artists each year that have either never been featured at auction before, or are new to Sotheby’s. But the next day, Christie’s failed to match up, making just $4m (with fees) against its pre sale estimate of $5.8m-$7.1m (without fees) with a sell through rate of just 48%, or 57 out of 117 lots.
The sale’s top lot, Family (1946) by Francis Newton Souza—a scathing depiction of poverty influenced by Souza’s Marxist leanings—brought in $880,000 (with fees) against a high estimate of $600,000, while Tyeb Mehta’s Untitled (Confidant) (1962) made $750,000 (with fees) against an estimate of $600,000-$800,000. Deepanjana Klein, Christie’s international head of department for contemporary Indian & Southeast Asian art, confirms this is the same Mehta that
