Dinesh Vazirani

Portrait of a Collector: 1995-2009

Members of the Indian art community are now looking to create and sustain value and stability in the market. Dinesh Vazirani hopes we do not fritter away this opportunity.

SINCE THE MID-1990S, THE WORLD OF modern and contemporary Indian art has experienced a number of important developments – some unprecedented, most overdue. Over the years, not only did a distinct group of contemporary artists establish their dynamic voices but the cultural idioms of Indian art found themselves suddenly translated into a vibrant, rapidly expanding market, only recently re-jigged by a global recession.

During this period of change and volatility, the way in which Indian art was collected, and its collector base, underwent considerable transformations. It was this constantly growing and evolving collectorship that, to a large extent, determined the course that Indian art has taken, and that will ascertain its future at this critical juncture.

Collecting Indian art in the mid-1990s was not easy, particularly outside India. There was a market for antiquities and miniatures but not for post-independence art. Moving back to India in 1994, we thought it would be easier to expand our small art collection in Bombay than it had been abroad. As newcomers, however, we faced unexpected hurdles in entering the small, sheltered community of galleries and dealers in the city, and gaining access to works and pricing information. Walk-in sales were practically unheard of, and new collectors were not courted or encouraged. As a result, Indian art was not widely appreciated, new artists found it hard to find patronage, and although there wasn’t stagnation in the field, it remained an exclusive one, indifferent to expansion and development.

Eminent collectors were also few and far between. Most of the art produced in the country between the 1950s and the 1990s was either gifted to friends and patrons of the artists or bought by a small group comprising a few Indian collectors, some visitors, foreign diplomats and various corporate houses. Amongst these, the collections of Ebrahim Alkazi, Jehangir Nicholson, Chester and Davida Herwitz, and the Tata Group are probably the best known.

It was the Herwitz Collection, in fact, that heralded the first major change in the way modern and contemporary Indian art was collected. In 1995 and 1996, part of this immense collection was offered at public auction in New York to raise funds for a planned permanent display of the collection. These were the first large-scale, international auctions of modern and contemporary Indian art, and the first significant exposure for many Indian artists outside India.

These auctions and the series of sales that followed offered works by important Indian artists to collectors (without them having to belong to any close-knit community). For the first time, prices of modern and contemporary Indian art were published, and respected authorities in the field documented results and interest levels. Opening the floodgates by changing the way in which collectors could access Indian art and information related to it, public auctions expanded the playing field overnight.

A watershed event, the 1995 Herwitz auction shaped a new generation of collectors – largely Americans of Indian origin, looking to engage with and promote contemporaryIndian culture. In the decade that followed, however, India’s domestic artscape also swelled. From a small group of stalwart artists’ collectives and galleries in New Delhi and Mumbai, it came to include, by 2008, new galleries with branches in cities all over the country and the world, auction houses with a global clientele, and most recently, the first private museum of contemporary Indian art in the country.

Subsequently, new global platforms also opened up to Indian art and artists, offering them valuable exposure and engagement with non-Indian collectors. Contemporary artists, whose vocabularies interconnected the local and the global, were most successful in crossing geographies. Soon, their work was included in international fairs and auctions, and powerhouse galleries and collectors, including Hauser & Wirth and Francois Pinault, began to take active interest in them.

Trying to grasp these developments, and the speed with which they occurred, collectors began to seek each other out and exchange information, opinions and advice. Many created spaces and forums where they could discuss these matters, several of them online and open to the public, and fairs like the Indian Art Summit, featuring talks and panel discussions alongside the displays, were launched.

Like it does in all markets, this hype, coupled with escalating prices, brought Indian art to the attention of investors. Joining the ranks of collectors, they bought and sold art in the primary and secondary markets, either individually or through the art funds they founded. Almost always, these transactions were hugely profitable, driving prices even higher, particularly in the contemporary arena. The best example of this escalation is perhaps Subodh Gupta’s canvases, which sold for US$ 18,000 in 2004, but commanded upwards of US$ 1 million only four years later.

M. F. Husain on Sotheby’s catalogue cover featuring the 1995 Herwitz collection sale in New York. IMAGE COURTESY AND COPYRIGHT SOTHEBY’S