By: John Elliott
Indian modern art sales took a gigantic leap this week when an auction at the Mumbai- based Pundole gallery moved the star focus from the traditional top names like M.F.Husain and S.H.Raza to indigenous art with an exceptional large work by Jangarh Singh Shyam being sold for a record hammer price of Rs18 crore. That is approximately $2.15m, including Pundole’s (generous) 15% buyer’s premium, just over seven times a $303,000 record set for the artist just five days earlier at Saffronart in Mumbai, which beat a $91,000 sale at Pundole in 2023 and far exceeded prices around $30,000 or far less in earlier years.
Shyam is probably India’s most famous indigenous artist. He belonged to the central Indian Gond tribe and lived in the state of Madhya Pradesh.
He was a flute player and painted traditional motifs and scenes using natural pigments on the walls of Patangarh, his hill-top village, until he was discovered in the early 1980s by Jagdish Swaminathan, an established artist whose works have also figured in the recent auctions.
While his records are an unexpected breakthrough for indigenous art, the $2.15m is of course not large compared with South Asian auction records that are currently heading towards $20m for prominent Indian artists including the Mumbai-based Progressives group. M.F.Husain topped the Pundole auction with a striking 48in x 24in oil on board (below) titled Red Girl that sold for a hammer price of Rs65 crore ($6.7m), thirteen times the top estimate of Rs5 crore.
Shyam belonged to the Pardhan Gond community that had strong musical traditions. Bards told stories that preserved the myths and genealogy of Gond rulers and their people.
As Shyam’s works this week show, the Gond artists transfer these stories onto canvas and paper, portraying scenes, real and imagined, from their lives in India’s jungles and forests, weaving tales that combine their tribal gods and animals such as tigers, leopards and deer with birds, snakes, trees and people.
Villagers in Patangarh and elsewhere continue to produce intriguing works that are available at modest prices in India, while more sophisticated works are increasingly listed in art auctions for thousands of dollars. International museums including the Guggenheim in New York and the Chicago Cultural Institute have examples of Shyam’s work, and Mumbai’s annual art fair in November will feature tribal and folk art.
Shyam’s story began when Swaminathan introduced him to acrylic paint and then, seeing his talent, took him to Bhopal, the state’s capital, where he was assembling local artists at a cultural centre called Bharat Bhavan. Shyam’s art developed sufficiently for him to be invited to Japan, where he was on an artist’s residency when he tragically died in 2011 by suicide, age 39.
“Jangarh has left his footprints and legacy in the history of Indian contemporary art,” says Alka Pande, a leading curator, who has written a book about him. “He brought alive the magic of his ancestral village of Patangarh and initiated a style of painting which has come to be known as the Jangarh Kalam. The prices of the Jangarh Kalam at the recent auction is a tribute to his creative genius”.
Both the Pundole and Saffronart record breakers are unusually large. Saffronart’s work, showing birds removing insects from the backs of cows, is 66in x 43in.
The untitled Pundole work, depicting a spirit figure with snakes and birds in a tree, is significantly larger at 91in x 69in and has spectacular colours. Both works are acrylics on canvas, painted in 1999, and they both originated in Japan, where many of Shyam’s works are located from his time there.
“The complex composition reveals the artist’s ability to paint to any scale. His patterning and technique is varied across the composition and shows his experimental nature and his skill and versatility as an artist,” says Rob Dean, a director of Pundole auctions.
The Pundole painting has never appeared before at an auction. It was estimated at Rs4 to 6 crore, and bidding on Sept 24 seemed to hesitate around Rs7 to 9 core, but then went ahead with three bidders narrowing to two, rising by a crore with each bid till one bidder gave way and it was sold for a hammer price of 18 crore. It was won by the collector with paddle 1730 who also bought a Swaminathan marble sculpture of a white owl and a bronze water buffalo by Somnath Hoare.
There was less bidding for the Saffronart record Shyam that came at the end of its auction and went for Rs2.88 crore ($303,158) including the premium against a Rs2 to 3 crore estimate.
The Pundole auction also had three other paintings by Shyam which were sold well above estimates, and a striking 32in x 44in oil on canvas from Swaminathan’s Bird, Tree and Mountain Series that sold for Rs5 crore (including premium) against a top estimate of Rs3 crore ($315,790). The catalogue said his style of presented “natural objects in intangible landscapes glowing with luminous colours”.
Records were set for many artists during the current season’s South Asia auctions with Christie’s sales totalling $22.57m on September 16 in New York, and Saffronart reaching $23.01m in New Delhi along with $3.3m in a two-day online sale. Pundole led the pack with $27.87m.
These results come at a time when collectors in the diaspora, as well as in India, have substantial funds and are looking for new types of art. “Buyers are moving on at a time when there are fewer top artists’ works available for auctions, and when art is becoming recognised as something that maintains its value through generations,” says Dinesh Vazirani, Saffronart’s co-founder and ceo.
The stars of Christie’s New York auction were the Progressives’ F.N. Souza, along with Ganesh Pyne who dominated Christie’s £18,91m ($25.37m) London auction last November with works from a Calcutta tea company’s collection.
Souza’’s Woman with Lamp (1949) was the top lot fetching $2.3m (including premium), almost four times its high estimate, and his Building in Trafalgar Square (1955) which made $1.1m. Ganesh Pyne’s The Slave at $1.2m went for more than four times its low estimate. There were also two Jagdish Swaminathan’s with hammer prices of $ 120,000 and $280.000. Christie’s set eight world records during the sale.
Souza also led at Saffronart with a remarkable record breaking Rs15.6 crores ($1.6m) for a work on paper – a brightly coloured 21in x 13in gouache titled Hanuman the Monkey God, (1965)
These top sales are sure to continue. Sotheby’s has its usual autumn auction in London next week including two small mid-1990s Shyam line drawings (below) offered as one lot with a £4,000-£6,000 estimate – and, rather irrelevantly given this week’s records, a “no reserve” tag.
Indian Gonds, especially Shyam, are clearly artists to watch.
John Elliott is Asia Sentinel’s South Asia correspondent. He blogs at Riding the Elephant. He is the author of IMPLOSION: India’s Tryst with Reality
Thank you for this article. I enjoyed seeing the art pieces. I hope someone sells prints one day; I'd like to buy one.