London Sales Preview: Christie's Contemporary

Christie's

Syed Haider Raza, "La terre" (1973)

London Sales Preview

Sotheby's Imp/Mod

Christie's Imp/Mod

Sotheby's Contemporary

Sotheby's Old Masters

Christie's Old Masters & British

Phillips Contemporary

Simon Sainsbury Collection

Sam Francis Hans Hofmann Subodh Gupta Hans Hofmann Tyeb Mehta Sayed Haider Raza Raqib Shaw F N Souza

Send a letter to the Editor

Save to Del.icio.us Digg this

Syed Haider Raza
La terre, 1973
Estimate £1–1.5 million ($2–3 million)
Christie’s contemporary

In a groundbreaking move, Christie’s is offering a work by an older-generation Indian artist in a postwar and contemporary evening sale. Although examples by new Indian artists—namely Subodh Gupta and Raqib Shaw—are beginning to appear in the big contemporary auctions, the market for works by Raza and other members of the Progressive Artist’s Group (PAG), of Bombay (today’s Mumbai), has emerged largely within the context of specialized Indian art sales. Recent interest in paintings by Raza, Tyeb Mehta and F. N. Souza was fueled by Indian speculators, and it leveled off as those buyers turned their attention to less-expensive contemporary Indian art. The market for the PAG artists’ work, however, has reached a “mature third phase,” says Peter Osborne, the director of London’s Osborne Samuel gallery, where devotees avidly seek out and compete for masterpieces by the established generation.

Raza’s La terre is one such masterwork. Painted in 1973, it is a joyous celebration of color, gesture and light, showing the influence of the Abstract Expressionist painters Sam Francis and Hans Hofmann, whose work Raza encountered while he was a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, in the early 1960s. It also marks a critical turning point for Raza, as he shifted from figuration to abstraction, employing transparent layers of acrylic paint.

Measuring just over 74 square inches, La terre is one of Raza’s largest canvases. A similar, slightly smaller painting from the same year holds the artist’s current record: $1.5 million, fetched at Sotheby’s New York in March 2006. Since then, says Conor Macklin, the director of the Grosvenor Vadhera gallery, in London, some of his pictures have sold privately for more than $2 million, and asking prices in India have now climbed as high as $6 million. Nonetheless, one senses that Christie’s is taking a risk here, relying on a core group of both resident and nonresident Indian collectors to back their artist in this key international test.

"London Sales Preview" originally appeared in the June 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's June 2008 Table of Contents.