It has been a record Asia Week in New York this fall.
In the Art Deco auction room of Christie's New York, murmurs of applause broke out at an afternoon session when the hammer rested on the bid by an Asian buyer for Rajputana, Syed Haider Raza's acrylic on canvas, for $220,300.
It is a world auction record for the artist, the son of a Madhya Pradesh forestry official who first studied art in Nagpur, then followed it up in Mumbai and Paris. The previous record for Raza stood at $158,025, achieved at the Saffronart online summer auction May 4-6.
Confounding scepticism that contemporary Asian art was a passing fad, the hammer came to stop again and again at Christie's at record figures for others, including Sabavala and Swaminathan. The phenomenon was repeated at Sotheby's.
Usually, it is the Asian Art Week in spring that brings the most dealers and buyers to New York, where the Week has not only become an annual tradition, spilling into 10 days, but has become a twice-a-year celebration of Asia's arts, both classical and contemporary.