Fine art prints aren’t just for amateur collectors — they are also a cheaper, and probably safer, target for amateur investors.
Almost the whole idea of prints — not the millions of offset printed copies but fine art prints in limited editions that are considered (lesser) works of art in themselves — is affordability, which makes the whole idea of “investment” in them seemingly ludicrous. But crazy as that might sound, prints might just make for reasonable investments.
The scope and scale may be different from that of original art with its appropriately higher prices, but investing in prints might also translate into gains for those with more modest budgets, or others checking out the market without wanting to get their fingers burned.
Which begs the question: what is a print? From the nineteenth century on, artists began to create a clutch of individualised copies in a process that resulted in etchings, lithographs, graphics, woodprints and so on. Each emerged off the plate or block with some infirmities in the print, near enough to the original but satisfactorily different to the observer to be considered original.
The technique was a part of the curriculum at art institutions but because only painting was considered “high” art, printmaking went into decline, unlike in the West where it had both promoters and collectors. Even though artists like Abanindranath Tagore and Nandalal Bose worked partly or wholly in the medium, it failed to become the toast of art salons at the time. India has excellent printmakers devoted exclusively to the medium — Chittaprosad and Haren Das among the masters, Anupam Sud and Pratibha Dakoji in recent times — but in public perception at least, there seems still to be some hesitation in accepting their work as having investment potential.
It is only recently, with prices having consolidated, that art promoters have turned to it as yet another medium. Even dealers have turned to newer technologies, such as serigraphs, the process of silk screening a print in the closest approximation of a painting in its original colours, with the blessings of the artist, who both numbers and signs each such edition, making it a collectible.
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It is clear from the process that the resulting print is affordable for those with fewer means at their disposal, but can it be an investment? Mostly, gallery owners tend to be dismissive since keeping a few sets of fine art prints amidst an inventory of original art is more likely to be a liability than an opportunity.
But with specialist studios, the story is a little different. Before the boom in the art market collapsed, serigraph prints had just been introduced in the Indian market, and prices rose sharply even before all the editions had sold out, leading to accusations of market manipulation — in truth, it was price manipulation — despite which people queued up to buy them. But even that became justified when a portfolio of Jehangir Sabavala editions acquired at a cost of Rs 9,90,000 (approximately £12,000) by an investor in 2007 was auctioned by Bonham’s six months later for £32,000. At the Khushii auction in Mumbai the following year, the Sabavala serigraphs found bidders at a platform reserved for high art.
At a time when you can get a small Haren Das woodprint or a Chittaprosad lithograph from the 1960s beginning at about Rs 1 lakh, or larger prints by Anupam Sud for a little more, does a Rs 45,000 serigraph in an edition of 125 make sense? After all, we must never lose sight of such a print being a reproduction, “fine art” or not, of a painting with possibly a price tag of, say, Rs 50 lakh. But I buy into the promoter’s argument that you might want to invest in more than one complete set of such serigraphs. Such as a recent set of 24 Sakti Burman serigraphs which, at an edition price of Rs 9 lakh, costs a pretty penny, but if you buy more than one such set, you could have your cake and eat it too, leveraging your interest as a collector into interest as an investor. That’s something you can’t do with an original work which comes in an edition of just one.
These views are personal and do not reflect those of the organisation the writer is associated with.
