CANVAS TO CURRENCY

WITH RECORD-BREAKING AUCTIONS, SWELLING GLOBAL INTEREST, AND RISING DOMESTIC COLLECTORS, INDIAN ART IS EMERGING AS A POWERFUL NEW ASSET CLASS.

- BY SMITA TRIPATHI

IN 1954, renowned Ukrainian surgeon Leon Elias Volodarsky, who was on a UN mission to India, discovered a large painting in a New Delhi art gallery.

Spanning nearly 14 ft and heavily inspired by the Indian tradition of miniature paintings, the mural-sized work comprised 13 vignettes in a vibrant, rich colour palette depicting various scenes from a typical Indian village.

The painting, by a then-unknown artist, fetched a benevolent $295 (nearly ₹1,400 then) from Dr Volodarsky, an ardent collector. Within a decade, the painting went on to adorn the walls of the Oslo University Hospital, where it lay in oblivion until its reemergence early this year in a packed auction room beneath the gilded ceilings of New York's Rockefeller Center. As the gavel came down and applause erupted, the art world witnessed a defining moment—M.F. Husain's sprawling, kinetic canvas, Untitled (Gram Yatra), was sold for $13.75 million (₹119 crore, at the then-prevailing exchange rate), setting a record for modern Indian art. The historic sale, executed by Christie's, cemented the work as the most expensive Indian painting ever auctioned.

A month later, Saffronart's online auction delivered another surprise: Tyeb Mehta's Trussed Bull (1956) fetched ₹61.8 crore ($7.27 million), nearly nine times its upper estimate, setting a record for the artist. The price matched the previous benchmark set by Amrita Sher-Gil's The Story Teller (1937), which sold for the same amount at a Saffronart sale in September 2023. Most recently, on September 27, V.S. Gaitonde's Untitled painting from 1970 became the second most expensive Indian work as it fetched ₹67.08 crore ($7.57 million) during another auction by the same online auction house.