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| The next big thing |
| Kishore Singh / New Delhi Aug 18, 2010, 00:33 IST |
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Tribal art is poised to gain respectability and value
 In 1996, Frenchman Herve Perdriolle began a collection of Indian tribal art, leveraging it later as a curator, to pitch the contemporary alongside the traditional, folksy or tribal — take your pick — not without some degree of success. In the bargain, he did what governments in India have failed to do despite their many awards and recognitions for tribal arts and crafts: focus attention on art forms that are dynamic as well as contemporary despite having a tradition in their folk roots.
And yet, Indian “tribal” art has a long way to go before it can start matching the likes of Australian Aboriginal artist Clifford Possum whose auction record of Rs 11 crore has an extremely low parallel in Warli artist Jivya Some Mashe, who at Rs 9.8 lakh is currently India’s highest auction price holder. Madhubani “master-artist” Sita Devi, who died in 2005, would have found it hard to imagine a canvas, or even a commission, netting her or her kin even Rs 1 lakh despite being feted around the world. And Gond wonder-boy Jangarh Singh Shyam, who committed suicide at the remote Mithila Museum outside Tokyo in July 2001, sold works for a few thousands despite countries and collectors expressing themselves amazed at his talent.
In part, the Indian marketplace does not shower recognition by way of prices because of the government’s, and therefore most Indians’, “Crafts Museum mentality”. This columnist has met all these artists not at private galleries, the Lalit Kala Akademi or the National Gallery of Modern Art but at their panned cousin, the Crafts Museum, where all “products” are bargained over in terms of hours of work and material used rather than on the basis of a creative idea.
As one example of how this impacts prices, one must see the value that Jangarh Singh Shyam’s widow, Nankusia Shyam, no mean artist herself, commands. At the Crafts Museum, soon after her husband’s tragic death, this columnist saw her sell a 37” x 55” canvas for a throwaway Rs 5,000; at another “crafts” exhibition soon after her works were selling for Rs 20,000; with a catalogue and reasonable marketing, galleries can easily position the same canvases today at Rs 3 lakh.
Jangarh Singh Shyam’s canvases are experiencing some of that fate posthumously. Already this year, a 28” x 47” canvas estimated between Rs 2.3 lakh and Rs 3.2 lakh at Sotheby’s auction in London in March sold for Rs 6.4 lakh, and in July Herve Perdriolle sold two of the artist’s paper works to benefit his widow for Rs 7 lakh and Rs 8.4 lakh respectively. What might in retrospect appear reasonable returns fail to match up to what other contemporary artists from urban environments might charge given the same platforms as Shyam earned in his short-lived lifetime of 37 years.
Jangarh Singh Shyam was a Gond tribesman from Mandla, Madhya Pradesh, who became a protégé of artist and Bharat Bhavan founder J Swaminathan. He was feted in Kolkata and New Delhi, shown in Tokyo, celebrated at the Magicians de la terre exhibition at Centre Pompidou, Paris, though material benefits stayed out of his — and other, similar artists’ — reach. All that might change with the forthcoming Sotheby’s auction on South Asian Art in New York next month. For the first time a canvas (86.6” x 61”) by an Indian folk artist has been estimated at a value between Rs 14 lakh and Rs 23 lakh and, if previous indications for Shyam’s works at auction are any pointer, the price might well exceed, even double, that.
So far, precious little has been done to position these artists alongside their “urban” contemporaries, or create dialogues to bridge the condescension that keeps one school of artist apart from the other. But with international collectors discreetly buying into this segment of the market, that might change soon. Internationally, tribal art from Oceania is part of the big ticket circuit, and analysts say the next big shove could come from similar art expressions in Africa and India. It would be a pity if Indian collectors lost the opportunity of bagging these canvases to those outside the country because of a flawed belief that a traditional artist does not compare to the likes of, say, M F Husain, or Subodh Gupta. They might be proved wrong sooner rather than later.
These views are personal and do not reflect those of the organisation with which the writer is associated.
kishoresingh_22@hotmail.com
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