M F Husain’s Safdar Hashmi, the artist’s reaction to the fatal attack on Hashmi while the latter was performing the street play, Halla Bol. It was also the first Indian painting to cross the Rs 10 lakh mark—at a Sotheby’s auction in 1989, Delhi.

Nineteen years later, when Safdar Hashmi goes under the hammer at the Emami Chisel Art Auction in Kolkata

on February 23, its base price will be Rs 2- Rs 2.5 crore. “Just don’t ask how I managed to get hold of the painting,” chuckles Vikram Bachhawat, director of the art house, as he proudly introduces the work. Since there will be an online auction too, interested buyers can log on to emami-chisel.com and place their bids from February 16.

Other notable artists in the 89 lots include Tyeb Mehta’s oil Kali III (estimated price Rs 5 crore), SH Raza’s Landscape (Rs 1 crore), Bikash Bhattacharjee’s Over The Dark Clouds (Rs 50 lakh) and Amrita Sher-Gil’s untitled work with a base price of Rs 16 lakh. “We wanted a variety of paintings and worked hard to get some of the best creations,” said Bachhawat. They also introduced the concept of lock-in period, according to which works of young artists need to be at least three years old, and those by senior artists, five. Also, no artwork that has been sold in an auction over the past seven years is accepted, and the provenance of each creation is listed in the information provided to prospective bidders.

Apart from the regulars on the art circuit—Satish Gujral and Dharmendra Rathore, gallery owners Arun Vadhera, Ashish Anand and Bhavna Kakar and art critics Ina Puri, Alka Raghuvanshi and Prayag Shukla. Artists Chatrapati Dutta, Sekhar Roy and Samindranath Majumdar, meanwhile, introduced their works at the do.