Ever since modern Indian art hit the international auction scene with a price boom in the early 2000s, top prices and most public attention have involved artists who emerged in the mid-1900s. It has been the 100th birth anniversary this year of one of the most famous, F.N. Souza, whose works appropriately hit a new auction record of $4.89 million at Christie’s New York in March.
Gulammohammed Sheikh’s Speechless City, 1975
An exhibition that has just opened at London’s Barbican gallery shifts the focus of collectors, auction houses and a wider audience on to more recent, mostly less widely known, and far less highly priced artists, working in the final 25 years of the last century.
At first glance, the exhibition’s time period looks rather arbitrary. By focussing however on works done between the start of Indira Gandhi’s state of Emergency in 1975, which blocked personal freedoms and civil liberties, and the country’s nuclear tests in 1998 that generated what critics saw as un-Indian jingoism, the works show a development of socially conscious and even protest art.
“The years between 1975 and 1998 were a crucible of creativity, where artists harnessed their imaginations to reflect the evolving spirit of society,” Kiran Nadar, founder and chairperson Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, told me. More than half of the works in the exhibition come from the museum’s collection. The UK audience was being offered “a unique glimpse into this transformative era of artistic expression”. (Kiran Nadar was featured in this weekend’s FT).
Three of Bhupen Khakhar’s paintings, 1991-1995.
Curator Shanay Jhaveri sees 1979 as a “turning point” because of the focus artists brought to “shine light” on the period. The exhibition was an “attempt to bring exposure to the breadth of art from India which hasn’t been engaged with before”.
At the start of the exhibition, there is Gulammohammed Sheikh’s Speechless City (above) painted in 1975 as the Emergency impacted on daily life. It is an appealing colourful urban landscape, but it is also graphic in its message with empty streets apart from a few dogs and birds in the air.
Sudir Patwardhan’s Town, 1984.
Near the end, one is confronted by a forceful array of three explicit paintings (above) by Bhupen Khakhar, India’s best known gay painter who had a solo show at London’s Tate Modern in 2016.
The paintings are described in the catalogue as “renderings of villages and groups of romping men … in all sorts of sexual encounters”. There is an even more graphic Two Men in Benares earlier in the exhibition. Khakhar, who died in 2003, bravely and controversially painted these works when homosexuality was banned in India.
This is the first major exhibition of Indian art in London for 42 years (since the 1982 Festival of India). Rather obscurely titled “The Imaginary Institution of India”, it runs till January 5, 2025 and contains a total of over 150 works by 30 artists featuring painting, sculpture, photography, installation and film, mostly arranged chronologically.
Some artists have more than one work on show so that, says Jhaveri, visitors can come to know them and follow how their art developed.
That however is not helped by the absence of any information about the works on the gallery walls – one has to hunt through a catalogue, often in dim lighting.
Khakhar has six paintings, as does Sudhir Patwardhan, who has been depicting life and crumbling lifestyles (above) in the expanding metropolis of Mumbai for five decades. (Patwardhan also has a solo exhibition at a London gallery.)
Meera Mukherjee’s bronze Pilgrims to Haridwar.
Arpita Singh has four works including a large 1993 canvas (featured image) that stems from widespread communal violence in 1991. Her mother stands firmly in the foreground while chaos spreads around her.
On the same theme of the 1991 riots, Gieve Patel has a horrifying Battered body in a landscape, also done in 1993. Tribal art is represented by Jangarh Singh Shyam, the veteran Gond painter who died in 2001, with a large acrylic on canvas and 14 works on paper.
Meera Mukherjee, who died in 1998, has bronzes that show aspects of India life including Pilgrims to Haridwar (right). Pablo Bartholomew has photographs from the devastating Bhopal gas disaster in 1984.
The post-1975 Emergency theme of protest, oppression and violence is well covered, but the show would have benefited from more evidence of how artists reacted to the nuclear tests. The only significant work stemming from 1998 is a multi-channel video installation by Nalini Malani. It is described as reflecting reaction to India’s (and Pakistan’s) tests, illustrating fears of the potential destruction that could follow.
Only two of the older Progressives appear, both with large acrylic-on-canvas works that fit the theme and show why they are so famous. Husain, who died in 2011, has a dramatic rendering (below) of the 1989 assassination of Safdar Hashmi, a Communist political activist, actor and playwright.
M.F. Husain’s Saldar Hashmi, 1989.
Tyeb Mehta, who died in 2009, has the Hindu goddess Durga slaying a buffalo demon (below). This reflects the horrors of the communal violence that followed the demolition by Hindu extremists of a famous mosque at Ayodhya in north India two years before it was painted in 1993. It has been loaned by Lakshmi Mittal, the London-based Indian-born international steel tycoon who bought it in 2018 at a Sotheby’s Mumbai auction.
Tyeb Mehta’s Durga Mahisasura Mardini, 1993.
The top auction price for an Indian work of $7.45 million was achieved at Mumbai-based Saffronart in September 2023 for a work by Amrita Sher-Gil, who died in 1941 and is not on show at the Barbican. She is one of nine artists who pre-date the Progressives and are classified as national treasures, which means their work cannot be taken out of India. The next top price was achieved by S.H. Raza with $6.45 million, two weeks before the Sher-Gil record.
The focus around Souza’s and Raza’s generation has centred on their mid-1900s Bombay-based Progressives group. Following the Souza’s $4.89m record in March for a 46×34 inch oil on board, another of his best-known contemporaries, M.F. Husain, hit £2.8 million for the first time at Sotheby’s in London last month. Other famous Progressives include Tyeb Mehta, V.S. Gaitonde, Ram Kumar and Krishen Khanna, who is still alive and painting.
Khakhar and Sheikh are the only artists in the exhibition (apart from Husain and Mehta) with works listed in Indian art’s top 30 auction prices, both having reached approximately $2.5 million at Sotheby’s and Saffronart auctions last year.
Shamiana, a hexagonal shelter of painted screens by Nilima Sheikh.
Many status-conscious collectors of modern Indian and other South Asian art seek these painters’ easily identifiable works for the walls of their homes and offices because they bring them instant prestige as well as being safe and probably profitable investments.
This is changing as new generations of buyers are appearing with smaller budgets and wider interests. They are looking at artists such as those at the Barbican including Khakhar, Ganesh Pyne, Rameshwar Broota, Arpita Singh, Gulammohammed Sheikh and Nasreen Mohamedi.
There is nothing for sale at the Barbican, but the artists involved need to be watched in galleries and at future auctions to see how successful the show has been in raising awareness and interest.
John Elliott is a journalist.
