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Bonham’s UK Fall Auction Sets the Pace for Indian Art Prices (Oct 19, 2006)
Indicative of the strength of the contemporary Indian art market overall, selling prices at Bonham’s September 14th sale were hale and hearty for many of the 67 lots up for auction*. As expected, the many Souza’s sold well—what was encouraging was the spiraling trend upward for other artists whose works were on the block.
The session began lively enough with oils from Pakistani painters performing solidly. Jamil Naqsh’s “Child playing with doves” went for $44,821; two abstracts by Sadequain for $44,821 and $64,992, while an untitled work by the same artist sold for $38,098. Four paintings by Anna Molka Ahmed fell in the range of $7,170 - $15,686.
The Indian art portion of the sale began very impressively with the gavel coming down for Antonio Xavier Trindade’s “The woman washing Christ’s feet” for $112,052. Six Jamini Roy temperas sold for an average of over $22,000 each, and some of the works that followed also finished with strong numbers—George Keyt’s “Krishna and the gopis”, $107,578; Krishen Khanna’s “Neighing Horse”, $71,711; a gouache, oil, and ink on paper entitled “Yellow Landscape” by S. H. Raza, $76,183. Four B. Prabha oils brought in $44,815, $58,258, $67,222, and $71,704.
A quarter of the lots up for sale at Bonham’s were works by F. N. Souza; of these, seven were ink drawings on paper. As anticipated, his oils all reached the six-figure mark--$134,459, $219,603, $282,301, with three surpassing $300,000 (“Red Landscape”, $303,203; “Still Life” and “Head of Christ”, each at $324,168).
But Souza would not grab top dollar on this day—that distinction went to Jagdish Swaminathan’s oil on canvas, “Mountain and Bird”, which sold for $386,861. Three cityscapes by Sadanand K. Bakre continued the trend towards the end with one going for $58,254 and two other for nearly $90,000 apiece.
Nine works, however, did not sell, including a Jamil Naqsh, a Sadequain, a B. Vithal, a Bhupen Khakhar, one Raza, an Arup Das, a Shamsad Husain, and two Shanti Dave’s. Final total take for the 58 lots sold was $3,547,724, a harbinger of good things to come for other contemporary Indian art auctions occurring during the month of September 2006.
*All prices quoted in this article include Buyer’s Premium and applicable taxes. They have been converted from United Kingdom pounds to United States dollars using live mid-market exchange rates as calculated on 10/18/06. Because of currency fluctuations, the USD amounts as stated may have changed since that date.
