MF Husain’s ‘Gram Yatra’ Sold For $13.8 Million; Makes Record For Most Costly Modern Indian Art Ever Auctioned | Pinterest and X (@ChristiesInc)
M. F. Husain’s Untitled (Gram Yatra) sold at Christie’s for $13.8 million (over Rs 118 crores) in New York, making it the most expensive work of modern Indian art ever publicly auctioned.
Art News reports that the amount, which includes fees, shattered the auction house’s estimate of $2.5 million–$3.5 million and was more than four times the artist’s previous record of $3.1 million, which was set by his painting Untitled (Reincarnation) last September at Sotheby’s in London.
The previous record for a modern Indian work was $7.4 million (Rs 61.8 crores) , for Amrita Sher-Gil’s The Story Teller (1937), which sold in September 2023 in Mumbai. (S. H. Raza’s 1959 painting Kallisté, which sold last March at Sotheby’s for $5.6 million, was given an estimate of $2 million– $3 million—the highest price ever put on a modern Indian artwork at auction, a spokesperson for that house said.
The 1954 painting, nearly 14 feet long, was a consignment 13 years in the making and one that Nishad Avari, the New York–based head of Christie’s South Asian modern and contemporary art department, called “by far one of the most significant works” he’s seen in his career. The painting comprises of 13 separate vignettes of village life in India.
The vignettes portrays a standing farmer—the only male figure in the in the piece. This is a self-portrait of sorts, and the only image which crosses into another vignette of a landscape with fields. The original owner of the painting was Leon Elias Volodarsky, a Norwegian general surgeon and private art collector, who acquired Untitled (Gram Yatra) in New Delhi in 1954, while heading a World Health Organization team stationed there to establish a thoracic surgery training center.
Volodarsky’s estate donated it to the Oslo University Hospital in 1964. For seven decades, Untitled (Gram Yatra) was unavailable for viewing by the public. . The 13-year process to get it to the auction block on March 19 included gaining the necessary permissions from the Oslo University Hospital’s board when the institution was finally ready to sell. The proceeds are going to be used to set up a training center for doctors in Dr. Volodarsky’s name., Art News reported.
Born on September 17, 1915 in Pandharpur in Maharashtra, Husain remains one of India’s most important and sought after artists whose oeuvre inspires art and conversations across the globe. An avid reader of history and mythology and Indian culture, a large part of Husain’s art includes paintings of gods and goddesses in the context of the politics of the time, works that put him in the crosshairs of controversy. With FIRs and persistent death threats, Husain was forced into self-exile, staying in Dubai and travelling to New York and London, where he died on June 9, 2011 at the age of 95, leaving behind a prodigious body of work.