Today a lot passes for art. A lot more as experimental or avant-garde artistic expression. Of this only a fraction will enter the market as long-term works of art or come under the illusory rubric of `eternal art'. Nothing is eternal, least of all art. All art is deeply rooted in time and space. It is part of an ongoing history and it is deeply related to a geographical space in terms of its execution and often the materials used. This is not exclusively so. There are exceptions, and the exceptions prove the rule.The art buyer must be aware of this and should not become the victim of the latest gimmick that is handed down as art. This is more than possible today as a lot of ``way out'' ideas are given credibility and funds in the West today, just as a means to keep the young unemployed happy. Nothing is as disastrous for the art investor as a collection of idiosyncratic works drawn from all over the world, without any sense of coherence.
Economically this has two disadvantages. First, without a doubt,art that is local sells best. That is why Hogarth prints used to sell for a pittance in Calcutta in comparison to their price in the London market. In the same way, the best place to sell a work of M F Husain or Jamini Roy is India. Even when such works come up for sale at auction houses like Sotheby's or Christie's, the clientele for them is largely NRIs. Secondly, a collection of local art, involving a minimum cost of transportation for selling, is obviously better to collect.
What should one buy then? The market is as good a judge of this as any. Two recent exhibitions give one an idea. One is the show of Subrata Saha's very simple Bengal-style works, showing at the Capital's Art Today-a show that was a sell-out. It has little to do with the gallery, for the show that preceded it was, if anything, better, but it failed to sell. The reason is simple. Saha is younger and much less expensive. But more than that, he represents an art history that has evolved as the Indian art buyer's taste from its mostconscious and militant phase during the national movement.
This taste rejected both Victorian academism as well as the revivalism of Abanindranath Tagore and his many acolytes who fanned out all over the country. It chose for itself a path not very different from that of similarly anti-imperialist artists like Picasso, an art that was a blend of the spontaneity and joie de vivre of the folk art of the peasantry with a concern about the materiality of the work involved in expressing it.
Starting out with the influence of the irreverent Kalighat paintings and Battala prints, we move to the expression of the art of Maharashtra's folk painters, the Santhals, and lately of Madhubhani women, Bhils and Korwas.
At the same time, another post-modern trend has caught on. This is the school of Neo-Tantrics. Essentially, it was a Germany-based attempt of the seventies to create a market for abstract art in India as well as to introduce the Indian symbolic art to the west. Ultimately what emerged was Indiansymbolic art with a modern stress on form, colour, tone and the material qualities of the medium.
The range of this artistic expression is varied. It ranges from the formalist expression of artists like S H Raza or Biren De to an amalgam of the formalist and philosophical in the works of G R Santosh to, if we look at works with a ritual content, the drawings and paintings of Sohan Qadri.
The show of the watercolours of G R Santosh at the capital's Dhoomimal Art Centre is of considerable interest to the collector. Santosh represents the age-old syncretic tradition of the subcontinent of Muslim artists pursuing themes drawn from a Hindo ethos. Additionally, Santosh is a Kashmiri seeped in an age-old tradition of Shaivism, which was equally the inspiration of both sadhus and sufis. Kashmir has a rich tradition of visual representation of these concepts. And Santosh is a very able exponent of this tradition.
His sensitivity is best reflected in his watercolours as the material itself has transparency,luminosity and aesthetic quality, which is most powerfully expressed in his early works, number 33 to 36. This the artist seems to have used as a springboard to more painterly work, among which numbers 3 to 8 stand out, as does number 13. The works on sale are priced at Rs 21,000-Rs 25,000, which is a very reasonable price indeed for works of an artist who represents a very significant visual tradition and whose works will become less and less easily available as he is no longer alive.
But anyone who sees the exhibition of his watercolours will be left in no doubt that this is the stuff immortality is made of. And for the investor, these works are an investment to cherish.
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
