How the gavel falls

In 2008, carried away by the excitement at a Christie's auction, Tina Ambani bid Rs 10.5 crore for one of F N Souza's most significant paintings, Birth, creating a record for the artist and a huge buzz about her bonafides as a collector. Subsequently, the 96-inch canvas was loaned to the Peabody Essex Museum for three years, but is on the block once again at Christie's sale in New York on September 17 with an estimate of Rs 14.5-18.5crore.

Experts believe Birth, painted for Souza's debut Gallery One exhibition in London, fetched its impressive value because it contains all the elements for which he became known - there is a nude, her belly bursting, sprawled on a bed; beside it is a table marked by his characteristic still-life; from a window, one can glimpse a typical Souza landscape; and the attending male - a priest? or doctor? - resembles the numerous heads the artist painted in his lifetime. Despite the celebratory title, the painting hints at something dark and uneasy. The unimpeachable provenance and recent history has attracted both interest and attention, and Christie's cannot be blamed for hoping that the auction will result in a bidding bloodbath that will further reinforce Souza's position and value.

But even before Birth comes up for grabs, another Souza masterpiece is creating ripples in the art collecting community with an aggressive estimate of Rs 15-20 crore. On September 10, at its second sale in Delhi, Saffronart is offering Man and Woman Laughing, the property of a Mumbai collector. The provenance here is just as credible (it had been part of American collector Harold Kovner's Souza collection), and the painting, though smaller than Birth, is one of Souza's more powerful renditions. It depicts a couple, their grinning faces distorted, yet there is something compelling about it. Painted in 1957 for another Galley One exhibition, it belongs to Souza's most fertile creative period helped by Kovner's fiscal patronage.

  The strong estimates for both lots is bound to result in an evaluation of Souza's estate. The founder of the Progressive Artists' Group in Mumbai in 1947, Souza lived in London from 1950 to 1965, and in New York thereafter till his death in 2002. Considered both provocative and controversial, he has been among the most influential artists of his generation. But over the years, his peers exceeded his value, whether Tyeb Mehta, S H Raza or, indeed, V S Gaitonde, or his predecessors such as Amrita Sher-Gil. While Souza's paintings have been an auction mainstay - Saffronart and Christie's both have other works by the artist in their September sales too - there has been no major exhibition of his works to create a legacy or dialogue as happened in the case of Gaitonde, whose works were recently on view at the Guggenheim in New York. Gaitonde holds the current record as India's most expensive artist at Rs 24.3 crore, auctioned at Christie's debut sale in Mumbai in 2013.

Will Souza equal or break that record? The secondary market gives a lot of weightage to benchmark works re-entering the market, which allows Birth an edge, especially given its lower estimate in comparison with Saffronart's cover lot. Man and Woman Laughing, on the other hand, has a freshness that is appealing, and a subject that is more universal, though the higher estimate is a little more intimidating. But the face-off isn't just about which work will command higher value. How the gavel falls will impact not just Souza's standing in the market but also that market's gradually hardening prices.

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Kishore Singh is a Delhi-based writer and art critic. These views are personal and do not reflect those of the organisation with which he is associated