The building of the Arts & Crafts Society, often referred to by its acronym, AIFACS, stood across the road from the Parliament House in Lutyens’ Delhi. Among the artists at the AIFACS exhibition taking place in the scorching heat of April were a few members of the recently formed Progressive Artists’ Group.

Founded in Mumbai seven years earlier during the Partition, the Progressive Artists’ Group’s motto was to liberate Indian art from the rigid confines of European traditions, create a new Indian modern art movement and make art relevant to the Indian realities.

One of those who walked into the AIFACS building to watch the ongoing art show was a European doctor visiting the Indian capital under a mission of the World Health Organisation, formed six years earlier, to help local doctors start a new hospital for operating patients with tuberculosis in the lungs, a deadly disease that killed millions in the country then.

Leon Elias Volodarsky, a Norwegian doctor, was instantly impressed by a large painting mounted on the AIFACS gallery wall. A painting of 13 vignettes portraying rural India, the work measured over four metres in length and nearly a metre in height. It was a new painting, finished in early 1954, by a Mumbai-based artist called Maqbool Fida Husain, a member of the Progressive Artists’ Group.

There were two paintings of the same artist and the Ukrainian-born Volodarsky, an avid art collector, bought the one he found the most impressive. He paid 1,400 rupees for the painting that he took to Oslo, Norway, where he lived after arriving in 1916 from the diamond hub of Antwerp in Belgium, where he was sent in his teens to work by his Jewish parents in Russia.

Sensational sale

Seventy years later, the M F Husain painting — Untitled (Gram Yatra) — that Volodarsky brought to the Indian capital was sold at a Christie’s auction in New York this week for 13.7 million dollars (about 118 crore rupees), making it the most expensive work of Modern Indian Art ever sold in a public auction.

The previous record of 7.1 million dollars (about 61 crore rupees) was held by Amrita Sher-Gil’s 1937 painting, The Story Teller, sold in 2023. The earlier record for a Husain painting was 3.1 million dollars (about 26 crore rupees), for his work, Untitled (Reincarnation), sold last year.

Reports say Gram Yatra was bought by Indian gallerist, art collector and philanthropist Kiran Nadar, the owner of Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi, and the wife of billionaire businessman Shiv Nadar, in an intense bidding where its base price was set at 2.5-3.5 million dollars (about 21-30 crore rupees).

“I was expecting the painting to sell for around 5 million (about 50 crore rupees) on hammer,” says Ashish Anand, CEO and managing director of Delhi-based gallery DAG. “But it turned into a matter of two very important people battling it out,” he adds. “Earlier, the record for a Husain painting was 3.1 million for Untitled (Reincarnation) that sold in London last year. This is a 450 per cent jump on his price record. The impact of this will percolate down not just across all Husain artworks but to Indian art in general.”

“Husain was an artist waiting his turn to break the record price barrier. The 118.6 crore-rupee sale was, of course, unexpected and unprecedented,” explains Anand, whose Delhi gallery made headlines in January this year when a case was filed against its exhibition of 116 of Husain’s works from the 1950s, titled Husain: The Timeless Modernist. The case was against some of the paintings that were termed as “obscene” and “objectionable”. Though initially ordered seizure of two paintings by a Delhi court, the case was later dismissed.

Showman and self-exile

Born in the temple town of Pandharpur in Maharashtra in 1913, Husain studied art at the JJ School of Art, Mumbai. Homeless in Mumbai in the late 1930s, he slept on the pavement for months before earning a living by painting big Bollywood billboards. A self-styled showman, Husain faced cases and death threats for hurting religious sentiments, forcing him to leave the country in 2006 on a self-imposed exile. He lived between London and Dubai until 2011 when he passed away aged 98.

“With prices for other Husain paintings also exceeding estimates, we can see Husain bringing greater value to the auction and gallery market,” says Anand. “Interestingly, prices exceeded estimates in most cases for other artists as well (at the auction), signalling the rising confidence in the Indian art market across the board,” he adds.

The new record for a Husain painting gives confidence to the art community in the country, echoes artist and Kochi Biennale Foundation president Bose Krishnamachari. “Husain was the man who made the common people realise there was something called Modern Art in India,” says Krishnamachari.

“Husain loved his country and its people. I remember him coming to an exhibition of 15 Indian artists in Dubai curated by me in 2007. There were artists like Shilpa Gupta and Sudarshan Shetty in the show. Husain visited the show three times, mainly to meet people and artists from his country,” recalls Krishnamachari.

Mumbai-based artist Sudarshan Shetty, who met Husain at the 2007 group show in Dubai, feels the increasing interest in Indian art will support artists in the country, “especially when there is no state support for artists”. “The record auction of the Husain painting is a kind of event that puts some kind of focus on art practice from the region, in many ways for all of us,” adds Shetty.

Recent years have witnessed some extraordinary sale of Indian art. In the middle of Covid-19, Sher-Gil’s In the Ladies’ Enclosure (1938) went for 5.14 million dollars ( ₹46 crore) at the Saffronart auction in Mumbai. It was the highest price for a Sher-Gil painting and the second-highest for an Indian artwork before her own The Story Teller broke it with a 7.1 million dollar-bid two years ago in another Saffronart auction in Mumbai in 2023.

In September 2020, 5.14 million dollars ( ₹46 crore) was bid for an untitled oil on canvas by V.S. Gaitonde. Six months later, another Gaitonde painting was sold for $5.5 million ( ₹47 crore), the highest ever for an Indian artwork in an auction at that time.

Husain’s Gram Yatra went under the hammer on March 19 in New York after the Oslo University Hospital, which received ownership of the painting from the Volodarsky estate following his death in 1962, decided to sell the artwork that had been hanging in a private ward.