A landmark second for the burgeoning South Asian artwork market was made immediately when M.F. Husain’s monumental 1954 portray Untitled (Gram Yatra) offered for $13.7m (with charges) in New York, practically quadruple its excessive estimate of $3.5m. That outcome set a brand new document for Fashionable Indian artwork at public sale, in addition to Indian portray. Main Christie’s South Asian Fashionable and up to date public sale, it nearly doubles the earlier document for this class, which was achieved in 2023 for Amrita Sher Gil’s The Storyteller (1937), at Saffronart in Mumbai.
That is the second-highest value achieved for a murals from South Asia throughout all time intervals, after the $24.6m paid for a Twelfth-century black stone determine of a bodhisattva from northeastern India, offered at Christie’s New York in 2017.
The record-setting Husain was chased by 5 bidders, in line with a Christie’s spokesperson, and offered to an establishment, bidding on the cellphone with Nishad Avari, the pinnacle of division for South Asian Fashionable and up to date artwork at Christie’s. The public sale home declined to disclose the establishment.
Christie’s gross sales of Fashionable and up to date South Asian artwork in New York on 19 March Courtesy Christie’s
A mural-sized work comprised of 13 panels, it’s “probably the most important work by Husain to come back to the general public market in a era”, Avari says. The Nineteen Fifties are Husain’s most precious decade and the earlier secondary market record-holder for the artist, the Untitled (Reincarnation) that offered for $3.2m final September, dates from 1957. Throughout these years Husain travelled extensively round each India and the world, and the varied panels of Untitled (Gram Yatra), every a separate vignette, element a wealth of worldwide influences, from Paul Klee and Pablo Picasso to Chinese language calligraphy. The work’s unofficial title in Hindi, “Gram Yatra”, means village pilgrimage and it depicts quotidian scenes of pastoral and rural life throughout the nation as Husain sought to seize the fact of India within the years following its independence.
Popularly often known as the Volodarsky Husain after its former proprietor, the Ukrainian-born and Norway-based physician Leon Elias Volodarsky, the work has been largely unseen for many of its 71 yr historical past. Voldardsky purchased the work throughout a posting in Delhi. Following his dying in 1964, his property bequeathed it to the Oslo College Hospital, his employer, the place it was positioned in a personal hall, out of public view. The hospital consigned the portray to immediately’s sale. Securing the work has been a “13-year journey, which is my whole profession at Christie’s”, Avari says. Proceeds from the sale will go in direction of establishing a coaching centre for future docs.
The entire sale made $24.8m (with charges), greater than twice its $11.7m excessive estimate (calculated with out charges). The spectacular outcome comes as public sale totals for bigger areas of the market, from London to China, are witnessing a downturn. Certainly, as Avari factors out, this Husain is the “costliest work to be offered at any public sale home in 2025” to this point, a notable achievement contemplating this contains night gross sales performed earlier this month in London.
Whereas acknowledging this second as “phenomenal” for the sector of South Asian artwork, Avari is cautious of viewing this as a possibility for public sale homes to shortly start lifting estimates for Indian artwork. “We elevate costs based mostly on sustained tendencies fairly than distinctive achievements. This work was really one in every of a form.”
