A SLICE OF HISTORY
Christie’s Auction House presents its gems as it readies for its South Asian Modern and Contemporary Art Auction, this 17 March 2021.
Aside from the masterpiece on display at Christie’s Auction House, on their site in their catalogue and at their physical outlet in New York, viewers can also get up close and personal with the artists, through wonderful intimate entries from their diaries, snippets of letters written by their friends and lovers, photographs and other memorabilia that makes the whole experience of looking into the art of the South Asian Modern artists even more informative and allows one to be a fly-on-the wall of history.
For instance, here is a delicious snippet from Denyse Proutaux, letter To Philippe Dyvorne. Proutaux was a close friend of the sisters Indira and Amrita Sher-Gil in Paris and even holidayed with them in India.
“Did I tell you about my Hindu friend? (sic. Indira Sher-Gil) Imagine that her sister has been at the Beaux-Arts (sic. Amrita Sher-Gil) for two years and is very talented and very knowledgeable. So, when she saw me, she went crazy about my hair and absolutely wanted to do my portrait with my hair loose. As it was for a competition and she had very little time, I posed almost non-stop for three days, and that’s why I couldn’t write to you as I had promised…”
Denyse Proutaux’s letter to Philippe Dyvorne, is dated 17 November 1931, but it has all the charge and excitement at meeting the Sher-Gil sisters, especially Amrita, as if it were written yesterday. The final painting of Denyse, that is on the cover of the Christie’s Auction catalogue is not the one she did for the competition, but an oil painting dated 1932 that captures Denyse in all her beauty with red hair aflame and a petulant pout on her lips. Sher-Gill painted her famed work, currently a National Treasure at the National Gallery of Modern Art’s (NGMA) permanent collection titled Young Girls 1932 featuring Denyse and Indira. The intimate friendship between the three has been captured within the lush Victorian settings in a photograph by the girl’s father, philosopher and photographer Umrao Singh Sher-Gil. Notably the work won Amrita a Gold Medal at the Grand Salon in Paris, in 1933.
Nishad Avari, Head of Sale and Specialist for South Asian Modern + Contemporary Art, explains the importance of the work and how honored Christie’s is to present this portrait in their March auction.
“Amrita Sher-Gil is a legendary artist in our category, who paved the way for the generations of South Asian Modernists who came after her. She was a revolutionary that broke the mold during her time living and working in Paris, and later in India,” says Avari. “There are three other documented portraits of Denyse Proutaux by Sher-Gil, but this is the only one still in private hands. In researching this painting, we were incredibly lucky to be able to access Denyse’s rich archive of letters and photographs from the time, which reveal such a vivid picture of the deep friendship she shared with Amrita and her sister Indira,” he adds.
It is extremely rare for works by the artist to come to market. Of the works from her short career documented in her catalogue raisonné, the majority in museum collections. Additionally, in 1976 she was declared a National Treasure artist in India.
“To rediscover a work by Amrita Sher-Gil in private hands outside of India offers an extremely rare opportunity for collectors, and we are In my many years of working in this field, I’ve only had the opportunity to handle a few canvases by the artist. To uncover something like this is truly a great event” he avers.
The auction also focuses on the works of Nasreen Mohamedi, Zarina Hashmi, the early works by F N Souza, Krishen Khanna, Binode Behari Mukherjee, Jamini Roy, rare works by Hari Ambadas Gade and Jagdish Swaminathan, early works by S H Raza and M F Husain.
It also has a very rare early work by Tyeb Mehta Untitled (Confidant, 1962) which is an exceptional example of the artist’s early work, painted during a stay in England, while he was working part-time at a morgue. These works are almost unrecognizable when compared to the smooth, carefully delineated outlines, and economic use of monochromatic pools of bright color that Mehta adopted the following decade.
Much like her jottings and diary entries, Nasreen Mohamedi’s photographic practice, which spanned most of her career from the early 1960s onwards, was a largely private pursuit. As Susette Min notes, these photographic prints, which were not exhibited during the artist’s lifetime, can perhaps be read as “personal notebooks that one can turn to for insight into her motivations and cite as evidence of the sustained way in which she looked at the world through an abstract system or structural order of lines, shapes, light, shade, textures and patterns” ( sourced from S. Min, ‘Fugitive Time: Nasreen Mohamedi’s Drawings and Photographs’, Nasreen Mohamedi, Lines Among Lines, London, 2005, p. 22).
Viewers can also appreciate the minimalist work by Zarina Hashmi that she did in the 1970s and 80s while travelling with her husband who was a diplomat posted all over the globe. Hashmi turned to Indian crafts as a source of inspiration. While working in the minimalist style she had developed.
Another artist who turned to the Indian crafts and arts was Jagdish Swaminathan, and we are made aware of his philosophy that underpinned his artwork. He argued that traditional Indian paintings were never meant to represent reality in the naturalistic sense, and drew inspiration from folk and tribal art forms, Pahari miniatures and Indian mythology rejecting the conventions of Western naturalism. “…Thus a mountain, a tree, a flower, a bird, a stone were not just objects or parts of a landscape but were manifestations of the universal…’’ (Artist statement, ‘Modern Indian Art: the Visible and The Possible’, Lalit Kala Contemporary 40, New Delhi, 1995, p. 49).
The catalogue provides us with much detailed information and presents a chronological aspect to the artwork, making the experience of the auction like walking through the history pages of Indian Modern Painting. The contemporary section offers important works by Anju and Atul Dodiya, T V Santosh and Subodh Gupta.
The sale will take place on 17 March in New York and will follow the format of a live auction. Concurrently, they will also be holding an online sale of works which will come online on www.christies.com on 4 March and close on 18 March.
Text by Georgina Maddox
Images courtesy: Christies
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