Record price for Begum8217;s Bath

November 16: Mingled with CK2, Opium and Eternity was the smell of something really BIG; and on Saturday night at Nehru Centre it took a re...

November 16: Mingled with CK2, Opium and Eternity was the smell of something really BIG; and on Saturday night at Nehru Centre it took a relatively obscure art lover, Parmanand Patel, precisely five minutes to change the pricing of Indian art.

Patel snapped up Raja Ravi Verma8217;s oil-on-canvas,The Begum8217;s Bath for a whopping Rs 32 lakh at an auction of Modern and Contemporary Indian Art. quot;This is the highest ever price paid for a modern Indian painting in any auction anywhere in the world,quot; says Nevile Tuli, the curator of the auction and chairperson of HEART The Tuli Foundation for Holistic Education amp; Art under whose banner it was organised.

The first wholly indigenous auction, another milestone, attracted Mumbai8217;s glitterati like bees to honey. Harsh Goenka, Yash Birla, Anand Mahindra, Usha Mirchandani, Sangita Kathiwada 8212; the owner of that hip store, Melange 8212; and the Piramals made the occasion worth being seen at.

The auction that was organised to raise money for HEART also had the critical eyes of Usha Ramamritham and Amrita Jhaveri, representatives of Sotheby8217;s and Christies respectively, checking out artists and prices. Said Ramamritham of the pricing, quot;Sotheby8217;s might have kept the estimates lower than this so as to draw in more people, but these prices held with the bidders.quot;

Christie8217;s Jhaveri agrees with that, quot;Pre auction I thought that the estimates were quite high, but the results were very encouraging for the pricing of Indian art. Auction houses are wholesale places for art, so our estimates are lower whereas Neville took the retail prices.quot;

High estimates was a risk which Tuli took and it paid off. He had intended this auction to become a benchmark for a more logical pricing of Indian art. quot;It is important that people understand the finances of the subject. And Rs 2.5 crore in cheque money for art, in a very depressed market like ours, is very good,quot; said Tuli.

Until now, pricing of Indian art has been signature-based with each artist8217;s name having a particular brand value. What this meant was that little weightage was given to individual piece of works. A classic case of this syndrome was the pricing of M F Husain8217;s works in the late 80s and the early 90s.

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Artist Lakshman Shreshtha commenting on Saturday8217;s auction, felt that the pricing and quality of this auction were far superior to those of Christies and Sothebys held recently. quot;While the Rs 32 lakh for Ravi Verma was justified since it was a rare work, I thought Ganesh Pyne was overpriced.quot;Over 200 bidders were in the fray to take their pick from a total of 140 works which represented 126 artists. Raja Ravi Verma8217;s painting was put up on the board first with the lower end estimate of Rs 27 lakhs. And it took just over five minutes for Paramanand Patel to make the masterpiece his own for Rs 32 lakhs. The reason why Ravi Verma still holds strong is because the seeds of modernism came into Indian art through his work first. And his works are imbued in the psyche of most Indians as the calender art genre of brocaded and jewelled devis, found in most homes, draws liberally from his paintings.

The next heavyweight on the floor was predictably Husain, whose 1986 work, Bangalore Races went for Rs 13 lakh. Ganesh Pyne8217;s The Sage fetched Rs eight lakh and Husain8217;s other work, was sold for Rs 8.5 lakh. Among the big buyers was Sangita Kathiwada who looked pretty pleased with her catch of six works on behalf of the Kamal Morarka Art Foundation. quot;I got all the works I wanted, including a Jamini Roy and a Francis Newton Souza,quot; she said. Among industrialist Harsh Goenka8217;s, purchases were Navjot8217;s Me, Myself.