Some collectors shun works that have been catalogued or even photographed, thereby running the risk of ending up with fakes.
Globally, much is made of provenance: the papers that authenticate the art you have invested in, with holograms, accompanying pictures, the artist’s signature on both the painting as well as the verification papers, gallery guarantees and so on. The implication is that these documents are not just essential, they might be at least as important as the art itself.
Certainly, the insurance industry could hardly function without them, and the art fraternity insists that the more visible the works in the public domain, the better it is for establishing their long-term bonafides for both buyers and sellers.
For this reason, investors and collectors tend to be swayed by what they see in published form — images in exhibition and auction catalogues, in newspapers and magazines, tycoons posing for photographs before iconic works from their collection — and these become important for referencing and archival data.
And yet, in a certain sub-sect of society, these are known as the arrivesti, the newly-rich, the show-offs, those with more flash and cash than good sense. The really tony collectors, those who have been doing it over generations, not only make their dislike for posing with their art collection known, they abhor the idea that the paintings or sculptures they have bought should ever be seen in any document in the public domain. There are collectors who have returned works to galleries or artists when confronted with images of those works in their catalogues.
So, yes, artists create work especially for them, and far less from being exhibited, they are never included in catalogues. Some great masters have never before been seen outside the privileged set, and on rare occasions when a work or works are bought at auction, care is taken that their images don’t become common currency.
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At one level, of course, this is a snob thing: while the nouveau-riche may exclaim over recognising a well-known masterpiece in somebody’s house, or office, the hallmark of a true-blue collector is ensuring that there is a surprise element to the art you care to show your friends and guests. A truly remarkable F N Souza, a rare M F Husain, an unknown Tyeb Mehta: these are treasures that only a few can afford, so there is a gasp value when someone who recognises the difference between good art and great art comes across them in the home of a collector-aficionado.
The point, though, is not about collecting but about how they return investment. Any published picture of a work by, say, S H Raza, or Amrita Sher-Gil, or Manjit Bawa, runsthe risk of being copied. It is well known that fakes are often passed off as the real thing on the strength of their original pictures having being printed in catalogues that act as a sort of security-blanket for many collectors. The cognoscenti, however, argue that when the works in their collection have never been exposed to the public eye, the risk of being faked is negligible. To which one might counter-argue that as long as a work conforms with an artist’s style and period, a fake work may be passed off as an original.
Obviously, much depends therefore on the documentation and provenance papers, which need to be impeccable. But this, alas, is where the problem lies. Before art created the big buzz it has in this decade, artists tended to be lackadaisical about such things as maintaining signature authenticity. Raza, for instance, changed his signature from time to time, but only few gallerists, or collectors, know the pattern in which these changes occurred.
While there will always be a premium on rarely-viewed gems, given the nascent stage of the art industry in India, I would put my money on works that are more visible in the public eye. Often repeated images of, for example, Husain’s Mother Teresa series, or Krishen Khanna’s bandwallahs, or Subodh Gupta’s steel utensils, may pall — and certainly rob the excitement of having them on your walls — but they might also prove less risky than unknown works which, if they’re authentic, will certainly up your quotient, but if they’re not, will cost you more than just your reputation as a collector.
