Wednesday, September 20, 2023

Do Not Mistake Sher-Gil’s Money as Indian Women Artists’ Gain

 


(Story Teller by Amrita Sher-Gil sold for Rs.61.8 Cr)

Amrita Sher-Gil is in news again, obviously for monetary reasons only. Of late people speak about art when it fetches exorbitant prices in the auction market. The gavel went down for Sher-Gil last week for a whopping price of Rs.61.8 Crore in the Saffronart Auction for her painting titled ‘The Story Teller’. I am not here to debate the price or the ethics of art market. I am just curious about the ways in which the news was reported both in the conventional and social media. Money makes news and news make money, that is the trend of our times. So, Amrita Sher-Gil’s painting fetching a huge amount is definitely newsworthy.

 

It is curious to see how unknown people exchanging money in ways unknown to ordinary people throw the latter into orgasmic spasms. Most of the people who have commented on the incident seem to have taken ‘ecstasy’ or some similar potion as they gush about Sher-Gil and her market worth as if she belonged to their families. Money’s intoxication seems to have become so contagious that it sends people hallucinatory in a sense. Someone posted in a whatsapp group, ‘Finally justice is done to Sher-Gil. It is a new dawn for the women artists in India.’ I was wondering about the kind of injustice that had been done to Sher-Gil by the Indian art scene till she fetched this kind of money. So I asked, did that person who posted the message really believed whether it was a new dawn for the women artists in India.

 

(Amrita Sher-Gil)

It felt like a hungry man feeling satiated upon smelling the fragrance of the delicious dishes cooked in the neighbor’s kitchen. I asked a few women artists whether they felt the same with the price of Sher-Gil, a sort of liberation, hope and aspiration. None felt so. Everybody thought that it was a market ploy that everyone knows about. Though people do not know clearly how auction houses function according to a pre-planned sketch, a blueprint for structuring the flow of money, everyone today knows that periodical transformation of dead artists into heroes and heroines is a necessity to keep the art scene guessing; who could be the next. As you play your cards on the regular Progressives a sort of ennui could set in. To dispel boredom better you introduce surprises. In fact, for those who closely observe the pattern of auctioneering, there are not many surprises in store for them.

 

Auctions are like a sort of beating hot and cold. Major works of Amrita Sher-Gil are in the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi. The rest of her works must be with her relatives and family estate if any or in the extended family of Sher-Gil. She is said to have done only 200 works in her life. So gathering the paintings from these sources is important. Auction houses need provenance and they know how to establish provenance in the absence of a real one. Once the work is found, provenance is ready and there are stake holders, it is the time for surprise. And the players are not the auctioneers and the faceless/unknown collectors. There are a number of players in between and around who decide what to be hot and what to be cold for the season.

 


(Tahitian Women Taking Shelter Under Shadow by Paul Gauguin)

I was looking at the reports that came after the grand fetching of money by Amrita Sher-Gil’s work. All the newspapers, portals and other mediums said the same thing about Sher-Gil. They all expressed happiness that finally Amrita got her due. Why so? In the same reports they say she had fetched Rs.6 Crores back in 2004, a whopping price for those times. Hadn’t she got her due then? Language of journalism, I tell myself in order to pacify the mild tremors in me. Then all of them invariably go on talking about her biography. Amrita Sher-Gil was born in Hungary and her mother was blah blah blah. Some words about the painting, ‘Story Teller’ that stands in the middle as the reason for this euphoria? No. Nobody seems to have something to say about it.

 

Some among the journalists write a few lines about the work and mention the year of its making, 1937. Thank god, at least that much information is there about the work! Then they too have to show their research. So they ramble on about Paul Gauguin, Pahari Miniatures and Ajanta Murals, the styles that had apparently influenced Sher-Gil. It is very easy to draw Gauguin into the picture. He was exotic and alien in Tahiti and also exploitative to certain extent. Somebody could mistake even Sher-Gil for the same; for her selective use of orientalism in a Gauguin-esque fashion. She was famous for making tableaus before making a painting. She modelled her paintings after the women in the hills in their utter poverty and gloom, exactly the way Gauguin had used the Tahitian women for his sexcapades and sexploitation.

 

(Painting by Amria Sher-Gil)

‘The Story Teller’ comes from the same stable. The gloomy colors typical to Sher-Gil is very much in the palette. There are five woman and boy in an inner courtyard, a location that Sher-Gil had always liked and used repeatedly as a recurring image in many of her works. She, a libertarian knew the plight of her rural counterparts and their wretched lives confined in the inner courtyards. They may be decking up a young bride or taking an afternoon nap, their world is confined in the courtyard. Sher-Gil knew it and she made them pose in those locations itself. The maximum she did was to keep them inside the rooms, against gloomy walls. Sher-Gil must have been enamored by the dark beauties, a kind of her own doubles in other bodies, in other guises and in other locations. This must have given her a different kick.

 

The five woman are seen animated in their own ways. The painting is called story teller. The woman in the lower middle is seen recounting something but it doesn’t mean that the other women are glued to her story. They all seem to be in their own world of reveries. The boy who is on the charpoy with his mother or aunt is interested in the story. There is a dog cooling off under the charpoy and there are three bovine creatures minding their own business, except one which is looking intently at the betel leaf that the lady is holding. There is a man in the picture who has not been given any permission to come in. He wants to inform something to ladies or he is keeping an eye on them. His precarious position shows that he doesn’t hold any power on the women in their own locations. The liminal line that separates two worlds, of the men and women, though not really an emphatic one plays a pivotal role in the painting which only a pair of trained eyes could see.

 

Happy that money is flowing into the Indian art market which will have trickle effect on the younger contemporaries. However, Amrita Sher-Gil’s painting fetching sixty one crore rupees is definitely not going to help the Indian artists in general or the Indian women artists in particular. Auction results are a different game altogether. One thing is true; Amrita Sher-Gil’s works will slowly re-surface in the coming days and there would be a lot of activities in the secondary market. It is always good for the art market. Auction house results expands the boundaries of the rigid art market and definitely, slowly the money bags will loosen the strings before the contemporary works of art too.

JohnyML

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