The top auction price ever paid for modern Indian art almost doubled yesterday (March 19) to $13.75m at a Christie’s sale in New York. This totally unexpected price, approximately four times estimates, was achieved for a rare painting by M.F. Husain, one of the country’s most prominent modern artists. The previous Indian art record was $7.4m, while the record for a Husain painting was $3.1m, set last year.
The surprising price was achieved because there were two (Indian) bidders, both determined to win, and because the very large 14ft-long painting (above and below) – known as the Volodarsky Husain – has a rare provenance, having been hidden away in Norway and scarcely ever seen in public since it was painted in 1954.
Kiran Nadar is believed to have won the work for her famous New Delhi art museum known as KNMA. It was highly predictable that she would be determined to obtain this important work by such a leading modern Indian artist as Husain. It is also quite likely that this was realised by her rival, who is believed to have been Shankh Mitra, CEO of Welltower, a US real estate investment trust.
Yet the two pursued each other and pushed the price up to what seemed unbelievable levels, topping $10m and stopping at a hammer price of $11.6m when Mitra gave up. The two bid against each other for other works in both the Christie’s auction and one that Sotheby’s held in New York on March 17.
The “Volodarsky Husain” also known as “Gram Yatra” – 35in x 166in oil on canvas. Women play a central role – milking cows, milling grain, riding carts and caring for children — symbolising fertility, creation, and renewal
The painting has remained largely unseen since it was bought in 1954 by a Ukrainian-born, Norway-based doctor, Leon Elias Volodarsky, who was in Delhi to establish a thoracic surgery training centre for the World Health Organization. Volodarsky took the work back to Oslo the same year and bequeathed it to Oslo University Hospital in 1964. Proceeds from the sale are going to support the training of doctors at the hospital.
Christie’s South Asian team first learned of the painting over a decade ago when they received photographs of it hanging at the hospital.
“This is a landmark moment and continues the extraordinary upward trajectory of the Modern and Contemporary South Asian Art market,” said Nishad Avari, head of Christie’s South Asian art.
M.F. Husain, who died in 2011, has painted far larger works, but this one is important because of the number of separate compositions and because it brings together aspects of art that he learned while travelling to Europe and China.
The work consists of 13 scenes, each providing views of Indian village life, influenced by his travels. In 1952 he went on his first international trip to China, where he met artists and was impressed by the vitality of their paintings and calligraphic brushwork. A year later, he travelled to Europe, where he saw works by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and others.
Both this week’s New York auctions have produced results far exceeding estimates, with a total of $24.9m at Christie’s and $16.8m at Sotheby’s.
The Volodarsky Husain.
Record prices at Sotheby’s included a Jagdish Swaminathan triptych Homage to Solzhenitsyn (1973) that sold for $4.68m, far exceeding both $1m–$2m estimates and the artist’s previous auction record set in December 2024 at Bonhams of $987,600. It is believed that the high price was the result of another Nadar-Mitra contest which Mitra lost.
In the Christie’s auction, a notable townscape by S.H. Raza, sold for a total of $2.3m against low $300,000-4000,000 estimates.
Indian modern art has been relatively slow to grow in value since prices first started to rise 20 years ago. Since then, top auction prices have been dominated by Husain and other members of the mid-20th-century Bombay-based Progressives group such as Raza and Tyeb Mehta.
But prices have been largely stuck in the $4m to $6m mark – far below, for example, Chinese art that easily passes $20m and has a record of over $40m.
That now seems to be changing. “The Indian economy is stirring and growing, so one sees these benchmarks in auctions that illustrate the spending power,” says Conor Macklin, who runs the Indian art-oriented Grosvenor Gallery in London.
“It feels like another seismic moment, as we last experienced in 2005, when Tyeb Mehta‘s Mahisasura first crossed $1m for a work of Indian modern art,” says Hugo Weihe, who was then in charge of Christie’s South Asian art. “That triggered a giant leap of confidence and recognition for the Indian modern masters.”
Bids however only go high when the person who is determined to acquire a work has one or more determined rivals. If what has happened in New York this week continues, there may indeed be the sort of boom that developed after 2005.
