GAITONDE LEADS CHRISTIE’S TO INDIA,-
CONTEMPORARIES MAY WAIT
JOHNY ML
At Mumbai airport on 22nd December 2013 evening I was waiting in the lobby to catch a flight to Delhi. A middle-class family was sitting next to me. The father, who seemed to have nothing to do with art or art related activities, was reading that day’s newspaper. His daughter was pestering him with a word, Taekwondo. Induced by the jolly mood of a prospective air travel, the father was teasing her with a word, ‘Gaitonde’. Irritated, she replied eventually, “yes, I want to do Taekwondo and want a Gaitonde too.” Had it not been the Christie’s first ever auction on Indian soil on 19th December at the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, Mumbai, I would have been surprised or shocked to hear Gaitonde’s name uttered by a random middle class gentleman in an airport lobby. Suddenly, the name, ‘Gaitonde’ was on everyone’s lips. The late artist, who had been a recluse throughout his life, had fetched a whopping sum of Rs. 23.7 crores at the Christie’s auction. It was sort of a resurrection from near oblivion to the status of a demi-god. Surprises were sprung on the 19th evening as the usual suspects like Syed Hyder Raza (Rs.1.82 cr), Tyeb Mehta (Rs. 19.78 cr), Ram Kumar (Rs. 3.50 cr), Amrita Sher-Gil
(Rs. 3.62 cr) and Manjit Bawa (Rs.3.86 cr) performed beyond expectations. Bhupen Khakar (Rs. 4.82 cr) and Ganesh Pyne (Rs. 2.30 cr) turned out to be future hopes for the auction players. In their India debut Christie’s made a total sale of Rs. 96.60 crores.
Social networking sites and text messaging went haywire as the news of the auction results from the plush Taj Mahal Palace trickled out. Eminent personalities in the Indian art scene who are otherwise reluctant facebookers went out on a virtual partying more by making optimistic and euphoric comments. A gallerist went to the extent of saying that it was a direct booster injection into the ailing heart of the Indian art market. Though skeptics did not fail to capture the opportunity to post their doubts, the general mood was ecstatic and euphoric. Gaitonde was immediately hailed by the media as the Indian Rothko, an expression that explicated the still indispensable effect of our colonial past. Gaitonde himself, who turned out to be the real rookie in the auction, according to his sister Kishori Das, had he been alive, would have taken the news with a strange coldness. The artist was like that. When he won a huge amount as a Japanese Fellowship many years back, he showed no excitement. He did not even tell his family members about it. His mother woke him up with cautious words, fearing that the figures would cause him a heart attack or something and broke the news. To her surprise, he said that he knew about it almost a week before. This was the case when the news of Padma Shri in 1971 came in search of him. His family members knew about it when the neighbors went into a celebration mode.
V. S. Gaitonde emerges as the rookie artist of Christie’s first Indian modern art auction recently held in Mumbai. Rs. 23.7 crores is invested on late Gaitonde’s abstract work by an anonymous American collector. JohnyML looks at the auction results and explains the emerging pattern of the future art market in India.
