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Indian art market hits meteoric heights in US (COMMENTARY)
By Jyotirmoy Datta, Indo-Asian News Service

Over the last decade, contemporary Indian art has burst through the gravitational barrier in the US, with sale records tumbling like ninepins.

No sooner is one record established than another smashes it. The $1 million ceiling is rapidly shattered and mocked by a $2 million ceiling.

If Tyeb Mehta's painting "Mahisasura" spikes through the million dollar ceiling, fetching over $1.5 million at Christie's in New York on Sep 21, Maqbool Fida Husain's "The Last Supper" crashes the $2 million ceiling on the Internet.

Newspaper reports say Husain, who turned 90 on Sep 19, was in Singapore for a solo show featuring 21 works, when an NRI Bengali woman from an Indian offshore company, Bedros Assets, bid $2 million for his painting. The painter shrugged that he hadn't met the buyer, just received the cheque.

Those present at the now historic Chester and Davida Herwitz collection at Sotheby's sale in New York recall their incredulity at the prices fetched there even by artists Krishen Khanna, Ram Kumar and Ganesh Pyne.

That was one milestone, while the recent September sales by Sotheby's and Christie's in New York was another. At the Herwitz sale, people gasped when paintings bought for Rs. 200, sold for thousands of dollars - roughly 500 times their original price.

Krishen Khanna once said that when Chester Herwitz forced him to accept the - at that time - princely sum of Rs. 300 for a painting he wished to present him free, it was like a lightning bolt. He decided immediately to abandon his banking career for painting in right earnest.

Herwitz left a similar trail of incredulity and change across India. And it was since that sale 11 years ago, that the importance of post-colonial Indian art began to be recognized. 

While collections of traditional Indian arts such as Hindu and Buddhist temple sculpture and Indian miniatures were well established in museums the world over, contemporary Indian art represents a radical break from the past.

Now Indian artists are no longer subordinate to patrons or trained solely as apprentices in established styles. Colour, form, texture and line, once used only for narrative purposes, have become the focus of their art, sometimes taking precedence over - or becoming - its content.

Since that landmark sale, wonders have not ceased to be. And records have tumbled not in the space of years, or months, but days, in the miraculous week of Sep 20-21.

At the Sep 20 sale at Sotheby's glitzy and modern gallery on New York's York Avenue, 14 records were posted - with a Benares series untitled work setting the world auction record of any painting by a living Indian artist.

There was scarcely time to catch one's breath before the fireworks at Christie's Art Deco New York gallery at Rockefeller Plaza the next day.

At the Herwitz sale, people gasped when the prices crossed the four-digit mark. 

Till last spring there was awe and surprise when a canvas - on which an artist vented his anger with furious brush strokes - or sketched his view of an abstract universe in rigid lines - sold for many hundred times the price of land in Hong Kong or Mumbai's Marine Drive.