As we enter the month of March, the Indian art world braces up for an interesting time with top three auction houses — Saffronart, Sotheby’s and Christie’s — lining up stellar works of Indian modern art across different sales.
First off the block is Saffronart’s Spring Live Auction on March 13 in Mumbai, which is already generating interest among art market watchers for its top two lots on offer.
The top spot is occupied by two works by two Baroda artists and contemporaries — Bhupen Khakhar (1934-2003) and Gulam Mohammed Sheikh (b. 1937). Khakhar’s 1996 oil on canvas, Untitled (Champaner) and Sheikh’s 1987 oil on canvas, Sursagar, are both estimated between Rs 6 crore and Rs 8 crore each ($731,710 – $ 975,610).
The presence of works by these two artists at the top of a premier auction list augurs well for the growth and maturing of Indian art market as it indicates the broad-basing of the lots on offer. These are names outside the circle of the handful few masters who have ruled and continue to rule the Indian market — the names such as Amrita Sher-Gil, SH Raza, FN Souza, MF Husain, VS Gaitonde, and a few others, with which we are all too familiar.
Of Khakhar and Sheikh, the former has been skimming the top of the auction pyramid for a few years now, a phenomenon celebrated by art aficionados and collectors alike. The works by the latter, too, are now beginning to regularly appear at the top of auction lists as I had analysed in detail in the previous week’s column.
Top lots at Saffronart’s Spring Live Auction
While a canvas each by Khakhar and Sheikh get the top billing at Saffronart’s Spring Live Auction on March 13 in Mumbai, the next in line making up the top 15 include familiar names, which are as follows along with estimates:
1. Untitled (Champaner), 1996, oil on canvas, Bhupen Khakhar, Rs 6 crore – Rs 8 crore
2. Sursagar, 1987, oil on canvas, Gulam Mohammed Sheikh, Rs 6 crore – Rs 8 crore
3. Front-Back Nude, 1950, oil on board, FN Souza, Rs 6.15 crore – Rs 7.79 crore
4. Tearing Apart, 1970, oil on canvas, MF Husain, Rs 4 crore – Rs 6 crore
5. Rajasthan, 1961, oil on canvas, SH Raza, Rs 2.46 crore – Rs 4.10 crore
6. The Lost Self, 1971, oil on canvas, Rameshwar Broota, Rs 1.50 crore – Rs 2 crore
7. Forêt Noir, 1961, oil on jute, SH Raza, Rs 1.50 crore – Rs 2 crore
8. Untitled, circa 1950s, oil on canvas, MF Husain, Rs 1.47 crore – Rs 1.80 crore
9. Untitled, circa 1980s, acrylic on canvas, MF Husain, Rs 1.20 crore – Rs 1.50 crore
10. Arunodaya, 1989, oil on canvas, NS Bendre, Rs 90 lakh – Rs 1.20 crore
11. Toreador, 1966, oil on canvas, FN Souza, Rs 73.80 lakh – Rs 98.40 lakh
12. Untitled, 2004, oil on canvas, Ram Kumar, Rs 55 lakh – Rs 75 lakh
13. Golden Curtain, 2003, watercolour on paper, Bhupen Khakhar, Rs 50 lakh – Rs 70 lakh
14. Untitled (Pindapatha), 1951, oil on canvas, George Keyt, Rs 50 lakh – Rs 70 lakh
15. Untitled, 1948, watercolour on paper, SH Raza, Rs 40 lakh – Rs 60 lakh
As the above list enunciates, a big part of it is populated by the names that even the lay admirers of art are most familiar with. There are multiple canvases on this list by SH Raza, MF Husain and FN Souza. While Ram Kumar and Rameshwar Broota may not have the same recall as the first three, they are part of the elite group of modern artists whose works lead the market. In this well-known mélange, it’s refreshing to see the names of Bhupen Khakhar, Gulam Mohammed Sheikh, NS Bendre and George Keyt. Works by all these masters have been performing well at different auctions of late; in fact, Keyt, the Sri Lankan modern master, has remained a top performer for quite some time.
An interesting, relatively new inclusion is that of Govind Madhav Solegaonkar (1912-1986). His Untitled (Taking a Rest), an oil on canvas featuring a group of women taking a break from work in the outdoors, is a charming work that shows amazing adherence to traditionalism even as it distinctly displays modernist strokes. It is estimated at Rs 10 lakh – Rs 12 lakh. Solegaonkar was born in Sehore, Madhya Pradesh, and educated at Sir JJ School of Art, Bombay. He was a member of the Indore Group, active from 1934-1937, which included artists such as NS Bendre, DJ Joshi and MS Joshi. According to Saffronart, he received many awards and honours during his lifetime and his works are on display at the Rajya Sabha in New Delhi, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and CSMVS, Mumbai.
Alongside, Saffronart will also host an online auction of Indian art on March 13-14, in which the top works on offer are as follows:
1. Portrait of Denyse, circa 1930s, oil on canvas, Amrita Sher-Gil, Rs 12.30 crore – Rs 20.5 crore
2. Untitled, 2003, acrylic on canvas, Ram Kumar, Rs 45 lakh – Rs 65 lakh
3. Untitled, oil and acrylic on canvas, Sakti Burman, Rs 40 lakh – Rs 60 lakh
4. Incantation, oil impasto on jute canvas, Sohan Qadri, Rs 30 lakh – Rs 50 lakh
5. Untitled, 1959, oil on canvas, SH Raza, Rs 40 lakh – Rs 50 lakh
6. Untitled, acrylic and ink on canvas, Avinash Chandra, Rs 40 lakh – Rs 50 lakh
7. The Killing of Jatayu, 2004, oil on canvas, Rs 30 lakh – Rs 40 lakh
The works on offer at the online auction are more affordable compared to the top lots at the live auction, with the exception of the work by Amrita Sher-Gil, Portrait of Denyse, which by pre-auction estimate is the most expensive lot on offer across both the auctions by Saffronart. It will not be a surprise if this work goes past its highest pre-auction estimate because any superlative canvas by Sher-Gil — one of India’s nine National Treasure artists — is always a hot commodity in the market. Her 1937 oil on canvas, The Story Teller, sold for an astonishing Rs 61.80 crore at a Saffronart auction in September 2023, becoming the most expensive Indian work of art ever sold.
(The writer is a New Delhi-based arts journalist
“Photographs are often treated as important moments,” Saul Leiter once said, “but really they are fragments and souvenirs of an unfinished world.” In this reading, photographs are unmonumental, able to capture something of a place, event or era, but not to fully evoke a feeling or atmosphere after it has passed. They are merely remnants, Leiter suggests, and this quote provides the title of his major retrospective at MK Gallery – shards of evidence to inform and furnish our understanding of the world, but never able to drive the story forward themselves.
Leiter’s own work puts his famous understatedness to the test. He was an “anti-hero, unsung and humble” says Anthony Spira, director of MK Gallery, but his prolific photographing of New York City over 60 years makes him a unique chronicler – not just in terms of volume, but also medium (being one of the first to experiment fully with colour fine-art photography), and concentration on a single location (around his home in the East Village). “His gaze permeated the tumult of the city,” says the show’s curator Anne Morin, “challenging what draws the eye and scrutinising what is not seen.”
“I tend to react to what I find,” Leiter said… photography is about “catching certain moments, and I don’t know if I’m going to get it”
An Unfinished World features 171 photographs alongside a selection of over 40 of Leiter’s lesser-known paintings, hung together in clusters which give equal priority to his early black-and-white work and his later, more famous colour shots. His paintings are influenced by the Abstract Expressionism which was developing around him in New York, though his canvases are shrunk and delicate compared with the scale and energy of his friends Willem de Kooning’s or Richard Pousette-Dart’s. The photographs are a mixture of intimate portraits, street work and fashion, the latter nodding to Leiter’s commercial practice, which sustained him in New York until he closed his studio in 1981 to work solely as an artist.
Leiter roamed the East Village camera in hand, capturing quotidian scenes but without elevating his figures to character status. Commuters, taxis, markets, waiters, lovers and flâneurs are all captured with his discreet eye, which also scrutinises the city’s sunrises, dusks, rain and snowfall. The prevalence of advertising billboards and restaurant signage speaks to New York’s density, allowing Leiter’s colour images to radiate warmth even when people are absent. In this setting, you can make pictures without a thesis; the city is so photographed that it tends to produce moments of visual intensity without overwrought choreography. “I tend to react to what I find,” Leiter said; he elaborates in a studio video interview at the end of the exhibition that for him, photography is about “catching certain moments, and I don’t know if I’m going to get it”.
An Unfinished World showcases Leiter’s eye for shadows, silhouettes and reflections, adding an anonymous quality to a tradition of street photography into which he doesn’t quite fit. Walkers’ umbrellas, long coats and hats abet this preference for concealment, and many of Leiter’s subjects have their heads bent as they rush down the Manhattan streets, sheltering from the wind and rain as he lurks in the middle distance. In black-and-white, these shades and angles create an almost mystical effect – hundreds of fragments which accumulate towards an incomplete vision. In a set of four square prints presented together, you can see the top hats and gentle gesticulations of the subjects. Here Leiter’s invisibility is truly felt; he shoots from a low vantage point, forever beneath, behind or beyond the action, bringing us close but avoiding intrusion.
There are moments of intimacy when Leiter shoots his friends or lovers inside. His longtime partner Soames Bantry appears in disarming bedroom snaps, while nudes of lover Inez and his first wife Barbara combine a model-centric eye with a personalised observation which seems opposed to his street work. In black-and-white, Leiter was a “surgeon of reality”, Morin explains; in colour, he “painted with a mechanical eye”.
Although relatively unknown for most of his career, Leiter was well-regarded among a small group of New York artists and editors in the 1950s and 60s including John Cage, Andy Warhol and Diane Arbus. His colour images were included in Edward Steichen’s Experimental Photography in Colour show at MoMA in 1957, and his black-and-white photographs appeared in Jane Livingston’s The New York School: Photographs, 1936-1963 book alongside the work of Robert Frank, William Klein and Helen Levitt in 1992. Howard Greenberg brought him into the commercial art world by giving him his first show in 1993, before which he received his first museum solo show at Milwaukee Art Museum in 2006, the same year his book Early Color brought him to wider art-world and photo industry attention.
And Leiter’s archive is huge. After his death in 2013, he left 15,000 black-and-white prints, over 40,000 colour slides, a similar number of black-and-white negatives and over 4000 paintings. It seems remarkable to suggest this volume of work can cohere without a distinct thesis or ideological motivation, but that is Leiter’s power of quiet accumulation. His work is distant but powerful – a photographer who saw but never interrupted. “I’ve enjoyed having books. I’ve enjoyed looking at paintings. I’ve enjoyed having someone in my life that I care about and who cares about me,” he said. “I attached more importance to that than I did to the idea of success.”
Born in 1921, Ruth Orkin grew up on set. Her mother, Mary Ruby Orkin, was an actress in silent films, and actors, directors, and journalists populated Orkin’s childhood in Hollywood. Ruth received her first camera—a 39-cent Univex—as a gift when she was 10. In 1939, at 17, she set off cross-country with her bicycle, camera in tow, to see the World’s Fair in New York City. The journey would take three weeks; on the way she hitchhiked some distances, cycled others, and was even featured in the pages of The Washington Post and the Evening Public Ledger.
Despite Orkin’s panache, upon her return to Los Angeles she found it difficult to break into photography. She began work as a messenger for MGM with the hope of becoming a cinematographer, only to learn that the union didn’t accept female members. A two-year stint in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps ended in 1943, at which point Orkin moved to New York City.
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VINCENNES — In the countdown to the April 8 solar eclipse, The Open Gallery features an exhibit of “the astrophotographic marvels of Chuck Reinhart,” who photographed the 2017 eclipse and will be offering prints for sale of that photographic solar exploration.
Reinhart has ordered the prints in roughly the same order that they were taken as the moon was traversing through the day-lit sky. Reinhart explains that in these eclipse moments, “we are made aware of something far beyond our common understanding. The eclipse reminds us that we are connected to the sun and moon as well as to the cosmic wonders of the Milky Way and the universe at large.”
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For its eighth iteration, the Xposure International Photography Festival claimed it would hold its largest event to date. While the proclamation is heard for many events in the region, often meaning a marginal increase in participation, in the case of the annual photography festival, the expansion is certainly felt.
The event has grown almost twofold. Running until March 5, it sprawls across 33,000 square metres at the Expo Centre Sharjah. It features group and solo exhibitions, workshop spaces, multiple stages, a dedicated cinema, as well as a trade area, where top-level photography brands are offering their products at discounted prices.
Since its inception in 2016, Xposure has sought to give photographers their due. This is especially true for this edition, where the breadth of the medium, and its ability to reflect social and climate concerns, is most evident.
The festival has installations dedicated to journalists who have recently died while covering conflicts. “Their legacy is a ceaseless call for peace,” the concrete-cast installations read, displaying the names of the journalists alongside a call for a ceasefire in the Israel-Gaza war.
One of the photographers exhibiting is Rania Matar. She is presenting a series titled Where Do I Go? Fifty Years Later. The works in the series reflect upon the destruction and inertia that have gripped Lebanon in the wake of its civil war.
Matar travelled to the US from Lebanon in 1984, in the middle of the conflict. Among the memories she has before leaving is watching Beirut’s Holiday Inn hotel – built just a year before the war erupted in 1975 – burn. The dilapidated structure still stands today, its floors gutted and walls pockmarked by shelling and bullets.
Her photograph Petra, Holiday Inn Pool captures the building’s current state. A woman in a vibrant yellow dress stands on the blue-tiled floor of the hotel’s empty pool. The structure itself looms tragically in front of her.
“I saw it from my apartment as a kid,” she says. “The war had started, and I saw room by room burn. Almost 50 years later, and it’s still like that.”
Matar began the series soon after the port explosion in August 2020. One of the first photographs is Alae (with the Mirror). It features a young woman holding up a pocket mirror, but looking off into the distance, towards the crumbled port.
“I went to Lebanon in late September 2020, right after the port explosion,” Matar says. “I thought I was going to photograph the destruction and I realised that I was more fascinated with the women and the reconstruction. I photographed Alae a few times. We went to the top floor of my father-in-law’s building. The top floor had been destroyed since the civil war.”
“We went upstairs and saw the port. When Alae lifted the mirror, she wanted to look at herself originally, but she could [also see] the port.”
It was then that Matar began the series, seeing that Beirut was evidently ensnared in the throes of a destructive cycle. Many of the photographs feature landmark buildings that have become embedded within the Lebanese collective memory. Even for those like Matar’s subjects, almost all of whom were born after the war concluded, the structures hold a shadow of the conflict and ring with the symbolisms of Beirut’s inertia.
“I left Lebanon in 1984 to study architecture and there was a major wave of emigration,” she says. “And now after the port explosion, there was this other major wave of emigration. For me, I could almost see my younger self and those women, you know, so it kind of slowly developed into a project.”
Tamary Kudita, meanwhile, is presenting Liberty. The photographs in the series take their aesthetic cue from the portraits of the Dutch painter Rembrandt, enlivening them with clothing and cultural elements of Zimbabwe.
“I started the series in 2019,” Kudita says. “The National Gallery [in Zimbabwe] was hosting a competition to reinterpret one of Rembrandt’s works but applied to the local context.”
Kudita was inspired by Saskia as Flora, a 1634 painting that depicts Rembrandt’s wife as the goddess flora, with a garland in her hair and a staff in her right hand. Kudita reinterpreted the piece to feature a Zimbabwean woman also with a floral headdress, as well as a straw-woven sweeper. Kudita says she asked herself what it would be like “to place [a] black woman within mainstream art history.
“Women often didn’t have that visibility that we that we deserve,” she says. The portrait emanates a regal energy, like many others in the series. “Even the royal aspects with the blue that she’s wearing, it adds layers of significance.” Liberty also reflects upon Kudita’s mixed heritage, which also incorporates South African and Dutch roots.
This is evident with the scenography that Kudita employs in her works, which blend motifs from various backgrounds. “It is done with bringing cultural objects together with fabric and also hairstyles, as hairstyles have a tradition of being undermined and overlooked.”
Xposure is also offering a platform to emerging names, many of whom are marking their first solo exhibition. These include Dhir Jakharia. Attracted to the landscape of the savannah since he was a child visiting the grassland during family holidays, the Kenyan-Indian photographer captures the mystery and splendour of the area across 12 photographs in his solo exhibition.
The works feature silhouettes of animals caught on layered, luminous landscapes. There is a sense of magical realism to Jakharia’s photographs, a play on perspective that makes it seem, for instance, like a giraffe is grazing on a hot-air balloon.
The 12 exhibited images are highlights of his works, a small fraction of what he has taken in the four years since he took up photography. There are a lot of factors that come into play when setting out to take a photograph that falls in line with his visual objective.
“There’s so many things that have to be perfect,” Jakharia says. “You might go out in the morning, and you’re anticipating the sunrise, but it’s cloudy, so you don’t get the sun. If the clouds are clear, you get a nice sunrise, but you have to find an animal after that. Then after finding the animal, you need to kind of position yourself above the horizon.”
Then there are photographers who reveal sidelined and brutal histories with their works. These include Daniella Zalcman. Her Signs of Identity is an ongoing photography series that highlights the stories of survivors in the US, Canada and Australia who were subjected to systematic and forced assimilation in a bid to erase their indigenous cultural roots.
Many of them were forcibly prised from their homes and sent off to boarding schools and foster care. Their names were changed, they were forbidden to practice their customs and speak their native languages, and even when they were allowed to return, their connection to their communities had been ruptured, often irreparably.
Zalcman says she first came across these systematic government-backed programmes a decade ago while she was interviewing indigenous people in Canada for an unrelated story. The US photographer was surprised that she had never learnt about it in school, that it wasn’t mentioned in their history textbooks. “I was both really angry and quite shocked that this thing had gone on for 120 years.”
“The last school in Canada did not close until 1996,” she says. “The US government actually invented the concept of the indigenous boarding school. That original school in Pennsylvania became the model on which all of the Canadian and other American schools were based. Indigenous children as young as two years old were forcibly taken from their communities and from their parents and were sent to boarding schools.”
Zalcman’s portraits are of survivors of these schools. The works contain the names of the subjects, as well as quotes about their experiences. Mike Pinay, for instance, who attended the Qu’Appelle Indian Residential School between 1953 and 1963, is quoted as saying: “It was the worst 10 years of my life. I was away from my family from the age of six to 16. How do you learn about family? I didn’t know what love was. We weren’t even known by names back them. I was a number. Pinay was known as 73.
The earlier photographs in the series are double-exposed works and interplay the portraits with elements and landscapes that touch upon their subject’s stories. The latter works involve collaborations with artists from indigenous communities who drew and embroidered over the photographs.
These include the portrait of Nixon Martinez, who was forced into the Ramah Elementary School between 1966 and 1973. “From day one, the government tried to do away with us,” he says in the caption of the work. “They shot our livestock, they burnt our crops. Then that didn’t work, so they went after our children.” The photograph and artwork is a collaboration between Zalcman and Mo Thunder.
Each of the 400 photographers exhibited at Xposure have their own way of using the medium to reveal tragic truths, touch upon social absurdities, or capture beautiful ephemeral moments with artistic insight. The festival, in its most ambitious iteration yet, has become a labyrinth of visuals that offers something profound and touching in every turn, offering an enriching experience that effortlessly distinguishes itself even amid the busy UAE arts season.
Xposure International Photography Festival is running at Expo Centre Sharjah until March 5
Updated: March 02, 2024, 5:33 AM
