http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/goa/Souza-Gaitonde-Goan-art-continues-auction-bull-run/articleshow/45507894.cms
Big numbers again characterized Christie's 'The India Sale' of modern and contemporary South Asian art in Mumbai this week, as 225 bidders racked up sales of over 75 crore for 80 lots. Once again, important works by Goan artists, Vasudeo Gaitonde and Francis Newton Souza, were among the most highly sought. Last year's first-ever Christie's auction in India saw a luminous abstract landscape by Gaitonde set the world record for the most expensive Indian painting: 23.7 crore (3.7million dollars). The Goan's benchmark was not approached this time, even as his Progressive Artists Group comrade Tyeb Mehta's 1999 masterpiece 'Falling Bull' notched the auction's biggest sale at 15 crore. Right behind Mehta, however, was Gaitonde again, and both artists' lifelong friend, Francis Newton Souza. A superb oil-on-board painted during Souza's Goa-obsessed early career in the 1940s sold for 6.6 crore, while an opalescent blue-green abstract painting by Gaitonde reached 5.5 crore. The numbers grow increasingly eye-popping but the names at the top of the heap have remained the same since the marketplace boom for Indian art took hold. Gaitonde and Souza died too soon (in 2001 and 2002) to witness the dramatic turnaround from their long hardscrabble years, but Mehta did get a taste before he died in 2009. These artists, along with their close friends M F Husain, S H Raza and Ram Kumar have headlined every auction just like they did at Christies (where two paintings by Raza sold for 3.8 crore and 1.85 crore, and a Ram Kumar notched 4 crore). It has been a long, strange and highly unlikely trip for this motley crew of artists who first bonded in their very early twenties in wartime (and immediately post-WWII) Bombay, and now find their paintings in demand in museums all over the world (a Gaitonde retrospective currently stars at the Guggenheim headquarters in New York). No one could have predicted this outcome, though it should also be noted that one person who was always confident that something like this would eventually happen was the engine of the Progressives, the irrepressible Saligao-born Souza. Souza was a born revolutionary. He recalled being kicked out of school for "correcting" nude drawings on the walls, and when barely 22 years old attracted obscenity charges for a vivid nude self-portrait. He was unimpressed by the colonialist academic style taught at the JJ School, and similarly scorned Shantiniketan artists as kitsch. Instead, the very young Goan insisted that he and his friends would "paint with absolute freedom for content and technique, almost anarchic, save that we are governed by one or two sound elemental and eternal laws, of aesthetic order, plastic coordination and colour composition". Looking back at that brash declaration across more than sixty intervening years, it's evident the freedom demanded by Souza and his young band of Progressives led directly to the most significant movement in the history of modern Indian art. As Deepanjana Klein of Christie's noted about Souza's 1947 painting sold earlier this week, it represents a pivotal moment in the trajectory of modern Indian art. Souza kick-started everything, and showed the way to his contemporaries. As M F Husain sorrowfully said when he learned of his friend's death, "He is the most significant Indian painter. I came into the Indian art world because of him." Husain mourned Souza because he felt India was not sufficiently proud of its greatest artist. But that recognition has started to become apparent, even if scholarship is yet to catch up with all the auction records. This is why the Gaitonde retrospective at the Guggenheim is important, as this reclusive son of Uccasaim is being acknowledged for the first time for his "translucency of light arguably unseen since the Renaissance and Baroque development of sfumato and chiaroscuro". Gaitonde and Souza are undoubtedly exemplars of Goan art. But they are also part of a continuum that remains excluded from both Indian and world art history. The extraordinary Angelo da Fonseca is only now emerging from the shadows (with a cover story in the latest issue of Art India), his close contemporaries Chimulkar and da Cruz remain largely unknown and unstudied. In this regard, the stellar new monograph on Antonio X Trindade (once hailed as the 'Rembrandt of the East') by Fatima Silva Gracias that was released earlier this week is a huge and important step towards a proper recognition of Goa's contributions to Indian art, "the invisible river" first described by Ranjit Hoskote.