Neville Tuli’s comeback auction of Bengal art didn’t quite set the art market on fire. But it has not deterred Tuli from his ambitious plans to consolidate and extend Osian’s.
The listlessness of the 300-odd people gathered in the magnificent ballroom of The Imperial, New Delhi on Thursday night for Osian’s auction was so thick that you could almost feel its weight. This was the Creative India Series 1 auction focussing on 200 years of art from Bengal, the first Osian’s auction in 18 months. Nothing seemed to inspire the posh gathering — not the rare wooden sculpture by Jamini Roy, the first to come up for public auction, that went for just Rs 7 lakh, far below its floor price of Rs 10 lakh; nor the three watercolours by Rabindranath Tagore which sold for Rs 11 lakh, Rs 20 lakh and Rs 10 lakh, as against the asking price of Rs 12 lakh, Rs 26 lakh and Rs 16 lakh, respectively.
Two early acrylics on canvas by Subodh Gupta, the poster boy of contemporary Indian art, remained unsold, as did the works of established modern masters such as Manjit Bawa, Manu Parekh, Ganesh Pyne, Ganesh Haloi, KG Subrahmanyan and Paritosh Sen. Thirty-six works sold below their lower estimate and only six cleared the higher range. The highest bid was Rs 60 lakh for Nandalal Bose’s Shiva Drinking the World Poison (reserve price Rs 60 lakh-Rs 90 lakh), an important painting in terms of art history, because it shows that the painter made versions of his own work. In the end, as much as 45 per cent of the 130 lots on offer remained unsold, and the auction raised a little more than Rs 7.95 crore, as against the Rs 8.6-8.7 crore that Neville Tuli, Osian’s founder and chairman, says he had targetted.
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“Given the economic situation,” Tuli says, putting a brave face on the results, “it was a success. The way it happened...no one could have pulled it off.” Claiming that he is satisfied, Tuli says that he considers the auction a “psychological statement that needed to be made” and a success because it achieved its objective in building confidence and creating momentum for the larger auctions coming up in the next six months. These will be the Creative India Series 2 auction in January next year featuring artists from “Bombay & Baroda”, which will be followed by a sale of works by artists from “Delhi & North India” in March 2012 and finally one on art from South India in May.
Also on the cards is the launch of Osianama, the museum housing Osian’s large collection of more than 200,000 cultural artifacts, next year in Delhi and later Mumbai, an “on-line re-search engine” that will function, Tuli hopes, as a one stop shop for everything to do with Indian culture and creativity, 7.4, a film festival on environment and heritage that will debut at this year’s Osian’s Cinefan, and so on.
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Perhaps, it is really as Tuli says a matter of bad timing, but the dull response to the Bengal auction must mark a rather unpropitious beginning to his comeback and his ambitious plans to expand and consolidate Osian’s diverse operations over the next two years.
“Comeback” is a word that Tuli doesn’t much like — “Please don’t paint this out to be some sort of ‘comeback’,” he’d said earlier at an interview at his Golf Links pad in New Delhi; “it’s not, for the simple reason that I never really went anywhere.” But, of course, it’s very easy to see Thursday’s auction in terms of a comeback, given that since 2009, Tuli has been dogged by controversies over Osian’s Art Fund, a Rs 100 crore fund launched in 2006 with much fanfare and ambitious projections of 30-32 per cent returns. The three-year fund closed in June 2009, just when the economic downturn was beginning to affect all discretionary purchases such as art, and Tuli found that he couldn’t sell his stock to raise the money to pay back investors in the fund. To compound his troubles, banks refused to give him a loan to tide over the crunch. In fact, even two-and-a-half years later, not every one of those who invested in the art fund has been paid in full — an opprobrium that continues to follow Tuli.
The proceeds of the Bengal auction and ones to follow are meant to make the final payments to the art fund investors.
But one reason for Thursday’s auction not doing as well as expected surely lies in Tuli’s insistence on focussing on Bengal art alone. Despite its ackowledged importance in the history of modern Indian art, art from Bengal is today somewhat less regarded by the contemporary art world and has failed to keep pace with, say, the Bombay Progressives artists in notching high prices at auctions.
It’s something that Tuli had himself flagged in a candid essay appended to the catalogue of the auction: “Osian’s has bravely (some would say stupidly) kept the flag flying for Bengal based masters”. He’d then justified his choice of Bengal for this important auction with graph the comparing the average lot prices of the top 12 Indian artists and the top 12 Bengal masters, showing how the six-fold gap between the two in 2006 had shrunk to a three-fold gap in 2011. Clearly, these projections have come to naught.
In a way, it is Tuli’s seeming obduracy, born of what he calls the “unique vision” driving Osian’s and an insistent belief in its higher didactic purpose untainted by purely commercial ends. “No one would start with a Bengal auction. I have purposely done it to say that we are still not going to change, this is the way we are going to do it. I could have easily done an auction with Husains, Souzas, Razas and it would have been so much easier and better.”
Indeed, at Osian’s last auction, “101 Rare Artworks” auction held in June 2010, two paintings by FN Souza sold for Rs 1.74 crore and Rs 1.44 crore, while an Akbar Padamsee went for Rs 2.52 crore. But then even the Bengal masters did very well at that sale — a Gaganendranath Tagore going for Rs 25.2 lakh, and Kshitindranath Mazumdar’s Radha and Lalita going for Rs 37.2 lakh (the sole work by this artist at the latest auction remained unsold).
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But why the insistence on Bengal? “All art pricing trends,” writes Tuli in the catalogue, “moves implicitly and fundamentally towards making historical significance the very bedrock of long-term pricing.” In other words, if you want an art market based on real values, and not just speculation, then you must give primacy to Bengal. Indeed, Tuli had paid obeisance at the altar of history earlier as well. “My book, Flamed Mosaic, was launched in Bengal, the first preview of Osian’s auction was held in Bengal,” he says. “We are idealistic, not entirely commercial.”
