http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/goa/Another-Record-for-Vasudeo-Gaitonde-and-Goan-Art/articleshow/50260116.cms
Another auction, another world record passed anew between Francis Newton Souza and Vasudeo Gaitonde. The two lifelong friends from Goa passed away at the cusp of the 21st century. But riches that eluded them in their lives rapidly accrued to those who hold their paintings. Earlier this week, an untitled abstract masterpiece by Gaitonde sold at a Christies auction in Mumbai for $4.4 million dollars, beating the $4.1 million benchmark set in New York a few months earlier by Souza's 1955 oil-on-board, 'Birth'. There is something incalculably powerful about the Souza-Gaitonde bond which is now heading inexorably towards a century of connection. Both artists were born in 1924, and were deeply attached to ancestral villages in Bardez, where each spent lastingly influential years of childhood. They kick-started the Progressive Artists Group in Bombay in the 1940's - an unruly clump of hungry-eyed artists barely out of their teens - which is now recognized as the most important moment in the history of modern Indian art. Husain, Raza, Ram Kumar, Akbar Padamsee, Tyeb Mehta, Krishen Khanna, an incredible roster. Both turned their relentless eyes to the world - Paris, London, New York. Gaitonde became influenced by Zen meditation, his work simmered abstract cool. Souza burned ever-brighter, his paintings exploded ebullient and bombastic. Both artists were grudgingly admired, but never widely appreciated. A few works went into important collections (Gaitonde into the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Souza into the Tate Gallery in London) but the unavoidable truth is both men died almost penniless, in near-solitary circumstances, almost totally ignored by the same Indian art "establishment" that now feeds greedily off their corpuses. Souza and Gaitonde died less than 15 years ago, and in their own lifetimes neither sold a painting for even $10,000 (a shockingly short period elapsed before their work breached $1 million). India's highly blinkered art mafia was eventually blindsided by the marketplace that developed for the two Goans after their death - in a depressingly familiar pattern, it was acclaim from the West that made the difference. The Tate Modern started displaying its Souza masterpiece 'The Crucifixion' in the same room as Matisse and Picasso, and a series of auctions in New York and London (powered by non-resident Indian money) established the friends as consistent record-setters. Today, every variety of instant art expert will babble in your ear about the merits of Souza and Gaitonde. But why did it take these chumps so long to figure out what was always true, what both Souza and Gaitonde were never in doubt about even through the most humiliating travails? It's hard to avoid the conclusion a big reason the self-appointed, self-important Indian "cognoscenti" overlooked our two greatest modern artists right into the 21st century is because of their very Goan artistic sensibilities. In his masterly curatorial essay for 'Aparanta' (the enduringly important 2007 art exhibition in Panaji) Ranjit Hoskote noted "meteorically brilliant" Goan artists have fed the Indian art world like "an invisible river". However, he wrote, "geographical continuity does not mean Goa and mainland India share the same universe of meaning. Goa's special historic evolution...its pride in its ancient internationalism avant la lettre, sets it at a tangent to the self-image of an India that has been formed with the experience of British colonialism as its basis. The relationship between Goa's artists and mainland India has, not surprisingly, been ambiguous and erratic, even unstable." That instability and lopsidedness lingers today. Souza and Gaitonde's younger peers Laxman Pai and Vamona Navelcar are alive, but just as ignored and overlooked as today's record breakers were just 15 years ago. Perhaps even more egregious is the case of Goa's utterly brilliant young artists: Viraj Naik, Loretti Pinto, Pradeep Naik, Shilpa Mayenkar Naik, Santosh Morajkar, Karishma D'Souza, Kedar Dhondu, Siddarth Gosavi, Kalidas Mhamai and others. This is a flowering of artistic talent that is second to no other place in the subcontinent. If they were Bengali, or from Bandra or Bengaluru, many of them would be mightily feted on the national stage. But they are Goans, and so they are talked down to and patronized, routinely treated as window dressing to "the main show" even at exhibitions in their own home state. Still. the artists of Goa can take quiet satisfaction from this week's auction result. It is a timely reminder that the flimsy whims of the fashionable set mean nothing at all in the long term. Conventional wisdom lasts but a minute or two. Make no mistake, Gaitonde and Souza and history itself is on the side of Goan art.
