Husain artwork sells for Indian record ₹118cr
The sale shattered Christie’s estimate, which was between $2.5 million and $ 3.5 million.
The value of Indian Modern Art received yet another fillip after a work by Maqbool Fida Husain sold for a record $13.7 million (approximately ₹118.7 crore) at a Christie’s South Asian Modern + Contemporary Art auction in New York on March 19.
The sale shattered Christie’s estimate, which was between $2.5 million and $ 3.5 million. Husain’s previous highest selling work, Untitled (Reincarnation), 1957, went for ₹26.75 crore (approximately $3.1 million) in a Sotheby’s sale in London last year. The highest selling work of Indian art sold in auction until now was The Story Teller by Amrita Sher-Gil, which fetched a tidy ₹61.8 crore ($ 7.4 million) at a Saffronart auction in September 2023.
Husain’s nearly 14-foot-long oil on canvas, Untitled (Gram Yatra), was made in consignments and completed in 1954. It comprises 13 vignettes of village life made soon after Independence and the tumultuous years of Partition. It presents the artist’s vision of nation-building through the medium of art, making it one of the most seminal works of modern Indian art. The artist inscribed the canvas on the reverse with “25.D.Badar Bagh/ Balaram Street/Bombay”. The same year, the work was exhibited in the artist’s home city alongside contemporary Krishen Khanna’s works at the All India Fine Arts and Crafts Society.
It was acquired by Leon Elias Volodarsky, a Norwegian surgeon and avid art collector, who bought it from the artist while he was posted in New Delhi as the head of World Health Organisation. When he finally settled as a surgeon at the Oslo Medical Emergency Unit, he presented the piece to the Ulleval University Hospital as a tribute to his friend Professor Kristian Kristiansen, write Thorstein Bache Harbitz and Prakash Narain Tandon in “The Spectacular Life of Leon Elias “Volo” Volodarsky (1894-1962) — Surgeon, Art Collector and Donator”.
“We are thrilled to have been a part of setting a new benchmark value for the work of Maqbool Fida Husain and the entire category. This is a landmark moment and continues the extraordinary upward trajectory of the Modern and Contemporary South Asian Art market,” Nishad Avari, head of Christie’s South Asian Modern and Contemporary Art, said in a statement.
Experts said that the impact of the sale will percolate down not just across all Husain artworks but to Indian art in general.
“Husain was an artist waiting his turn to break the record price barrier. A powerful modernist, his prices had not been in step with those of his contemporaries for a while. The recent auctions have corrected the anomaly,” said Ashish Anand, CEO and MD, DAG (formerly Delhi Art Gallery).
“The ₹118.6 crore sale was, of course, unexpected—and unprecedented. Now the most expensive work of modern Indian art, it has its roots as a seminal work in its origins and making. With prices for other Husain paintings also exceeding estimates, we can see Husain bringing greater value to the auction and gallery market. Interestingly, prices exceeded estimates in most cases for other artists as well, signalling the rising confidence in the Indian art market across the board,” said Anand added.
A second expert said Husain has been among the top sellers of modern and contemporary Indian art even before the present record.
“Read from a financial perspective, according to Artery India’s latest art market intelligence report, Husain, even prior to this historic record being established held the top position at auction of modern and contemporary Indian art in terms of total sales turnover with ₹1,721 crore achieved from the sale of 3,285 works since 1987. This exceeds the artist in the second place, SH Raza, whose sale of 2,162 works at auction have fetched ₹1,454 crore since 1987,” said Arvind Vijaymohan, founder and CEO of the art research and advisory firm Artery India.
Husain was a member of the Progressive Artists Group alongside artists such as Sayed Haider Raza and Francis Newton Souza, and is counted as one of the most significant modern Indian artists. Husain employed figures inspired by the historical visual culture of India.
A watershed trip to New Delhi in 1948, where Husain and Raza viewed an exhibition of classical Indian paintings and sculptures at the Viceregal Lodge (now the office of the Vice Chancellor of Delhi University), was a turning point for the artist.
In an interview to Pritish Nandy for the Illustrated Weekly of India in 1983, he described the visit as “the breaking point” of his life. “ I deliberately picked up two or three periods of Indian history. One was the classical period of the Guptas. The very sensuous form of the female body. Next was the Basholi period. The strong colours of the Basholi miniatures. The last was the folk element. With these three combined and using colours -- very boldly as I did with cinema hoardings [...] I went to town,” Husain said in the interview.
However, the artist was hounded in the last years of his life after a work of his attracted the ire of the Hindu right wing. Several cases were filed against him for his depiction of the female form, which members of Bajrang Dal and other groups averred hurt the sentiments of Hindus as they depicted goddesses. The artist went into self-exile in 2006 and lived between London and Doha. He died in 2011.
Earlier in January, nearly 14 years after his death, two of his paintings that were on display at DAG in Delhi were confiscated by the police after an advocate filed a petition saying that they had hurt her religious sensibilities. They are lying in a police storage room while the matter is being heard in court.
The record for a Husain painting was $3.1 million for Untitled (Reincarnation) that sold in London last year. This is a 450% jump in his price record.
“Gram Yatra was painted around the same time as Zameen was painted. Husain submitted Zameen for the first National Awards of the Lalit Kala Akademi and won the gold medal. It has been part of the collection of the National Gallery of Modern Art ever since and is regarded as Husain’s most important, and iconic painting for its size, manner of composition and subject. Gram Yatra’s price is the result of two prominent bidders locking horns to acquire what they both thought to be Husain’s most import work in private hands,” Anand added.
“The outstanding sale result of Husain’s Gram Yatra is being celebrated across the industry. It signals confidence in Indian modern art as a major force in the auction market and cements Husain’s legacy as an artist whose vision of India remains deeply resonant,” said Manoj Mansukhani, CMO, AstaGuru Auction House.