At Saffronart’s spring live auction on Wednesday evening, all eyes were on a Raja Ravi Varma painting, but some others emerged as victors and personal bests. Tyeb Mehta’s painting was sold for $5,596,000, including buyer’s premium. This is the artist’s highest-selling work in an auction worldwide. It is now India’s second most costly modern or contemporary work of art.
one of the paintings, Bull on Rickshaw brings together some of Mehta’s most important motifs and subjects, including the falling figure, the trussed bull, and the rickshaw. On the rickshaw, the bull writhes, evoking a sense of vulnerability, anguish, and enslavement. Humans and animals are both bound to their places in life. “The bull, with its flaming fury, is inescapably doomed to man’s aggression,” Amrita Jhaveri wrote in A Guide to 101 Modern and Contemporary Indian Artists . Mehta’s visit to a Bombay butcher left an indelible impression on him; in his art, it takes on metaphoric importance – a dying animal becomes a symbol for the problems of modern life.”
Untitled Draupadi Vastraharan by MV Dhurandhar was the other item that sold well during the auction, fetching Rs8.04 crore. Dhurandhar, who was born in Kolhapur, is widely regarded as India’s second most popular artist, behind Ravi Varma. The picture depicts a pivotal event from the Mahabharata, in which Dushasana tries to undress Draupadi but is stopped by divine intervention. The assault on Draupadi has just begun in the artwork, and she is pleadingly looking to the skies for assistance. Krishna appears behind Draupadi as a benevolent, blue vision, promising to turn her sari into an infinite length of cloth till Dushasana tyres of it.
The artwork could be a nod to Ravi Varma, whose interpretation of the same scenario from the Mahabharata was one of the auction’s highlights. Draupadi Vastraharan by Ravi Varma, which was valued between Rs 15 and Rs 20 crore, sold for Rs 21.6 crore. This is the artist’s second most popular piece. An oleograph of the same image sold for Rs 4.2 lakh at the Ravi Varma Press in Malavali.