Many Indians buy Tagore paintings at auction

Twelve paintings by Tagore sold at the auction at the hammer price of 1.6 million Rs 10.9 crore. And West Bengal chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee can rest easy many of the buyers were Indians. All the paintings were sold to different buyers and they are scattered. We are yet to discern the various nationalities of the buyers but what I can say with surety is that many of the works will go back to India , said Maithili Parekh,Deputy Director of Sothebys.

After the auction was announced in May,Bhattacharjee and other Kolkata-based intellectuals had raised a furore over the works leaving Indian shores. The works had been gifted to Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst of Dartington Hall in 1939 by Tagore himself,and had been put up for auction by the Dartington Trust. The CM had dashed off a letter to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh,requesting him to buy back the works. There were rumours that the government was going to bid at the auction to preserve the heritage of India. Sothebys,however,did not confirm whether any of the bidders represented the Indian government.

One had expected competitive bidding and a good price for these works because they are from the mature period of Tagores oeuvre, said Parekh.

At the same auction,a work by SH Raza titled Rajasthan ranked higher than any of Tagores individual pieces. Rajasthan sold for 500,000 Rs 3 crore 43 lakh,followed closely by MF Husains Horses,which fetched 310,000 Rs 2 crore. This is because while many deeply respect Tagore as a poet and writer,his value as a painter has been a matter of dispute.

Parul Dave,Head of Department of Aesthetics at JNU said,Tagore was a dilettante painter,but he was very aware of his dilettantism. One of the most striking features of his works was his ability to capture the spirit of his sitter while hands were his weakness. He painted with his tongue firmly in his cheek.