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Souza Painting Fetches 173,000-Pounds
The painting, called "Still Life", had been bought by an unidentified couple resident in Devon in south-west England. "We placed an estimate of 80,000-120,000 pounds on the picture but it exceeded our expectations," says Sam Tuke, of antique dealers Bonhams' Honiton office that carried out the valuation. "The market for Souzas has really taken off with many Indian expatriates and galleries in India buying back their heritage via an artist who is now seen as one of the best Indian artists of the 20th century." Souza, who was born in 1924 and died in 2002, is known in art circles as the Indian Picasso. His paintings often fetch six-figure sums and six of his paintings made the top 10 in the Bonhams sale. Another Souza picture, also bought for a song in a New York flea market in 1983, sold for 151,200 pounds at the auction.
Sotheby's sale of young Indian artists Sotheby's first sale in New York of works by young Indian artists, including works by Atul Dodiya and Jitish Kallat, fetched an astonishing $1,818,780 - an all-time high. The sale featured 58 lots by young cutting-edge artists in a variety of media and went far beyond the high estimate of $1.5 million. Artists whose works set records were Jitish Kallat and Sudarshan Shetty. The sale was 97.7 percent sold by value and 93.1 percent sold by lot. Of the 58 lots offered, only four failed to find buyers. "Today's results of our inaugural sale affirm that Indian contemporary art deserves its own spotlight in New York. The sale attracted participation from around the world from new and established buyers," says Zara Porter Hill, director and head of Sotheby's Indian and Southeast Asian department. The cover lot of the sale, Atul Dodiya's "Mirage", an installation from his famous "Shutter" series of 2002, sold for $216,000 to the International Trade (estimated at $180,000-220,000). The work was produced on a shopkeeper's shutter, which is commonplace in the commercial districts of Mumbai and under normal circumstances bears advertisements for everyday products. The artist depicts Mahatma Gandhi on its corrugated exterior. Shibu Natesan's "Existence of Instinct-4" (2004) brought $156,000 (est. $120,000-180,000) from a private Indian collector. Characteristic of the artist's signature style, it was observed by Bhavna Kakar in Art & Deal 2005 as: "[Natesan] works through a particular method of startling photographic simulation of the real...He chooses to work as a realist using two strategies - directness and detachment. His details tie his subjects to a concrete reality but this perfection adds a certain detachment or emotional estrangement." Ravinder G. Reddy's iconic "Head-06", a gold gilded work painted on polyester resin fibre glass, fetched $156,000 (est. $100,000-150,000), selling to a private Indian collector. Reddy's monumental female heads are inspired by the forms of classical Indian sculpture, yet their iconography is firmly rooted in the urban setting of contemporary India. Works by Subodh Gupta also sold well. An Untitled work commanded $114,000 (est. $35,000-45,000) and went to a private Indian collector, while "Feast for Hundred and Eight Gods" (2005), a sculpture that uses stainless steel utensils and is the first of an edition of three, sold for $72,000 to the American Trade (est. $40,000-60,000). Looking at both Christie's and Sotheby's sales in the past week, the figures tell a fine story. Following the record total for its Asian sales in New York achieved last season, Sotheby's once again led the New York Asian art sales, totalling $45.35 million (est. $38.8-54.3 million).
Kennedys in Indian attire The Kennedy myth burns as bright as ever. An original gouache painting done after US First Lady and glamorous socialite Jacqueline Kennedy visited India and Pakistan in 1962 showing the Kennedys in Indian attire will be on sale in Swindon in October. The Kennedy memorabilia also includes a series of three engravings given as Christmas cards signed by then president John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline. They will be auctioned at the Dominic Winter Auction House in London on Oct 4. "It shows JF Kennedy and children wearing Indian dress and turbans, with JFK walking at the front and dragging a dead tiger by its tail, followed by John junior and Caroline riding on white and black horses," said auctioneer Chris Albury. The items, which belonged to the family of Kent woman Maud Shaw, the Kennedy family's nanny during JFK's presidency, are expected to fetch about 20,000 pounds.
India chapter of Royal Society for the Arts Britain's 250-year-old Royal Society for the Arts (RSA) has launched its Indian chapter in London. India is only the third country outside Britain to host such a facility. The Indian chapter already has 100 RSA fellowship holders, making it the biggest outside any British city. "Only two other such chapters exist - in the US and Australia," says British high commissioner Michael Arthur. For Arthur, the new initiative is all about ideas and innovation. "It's all about innovation and ideas, of trying to find new ways of doing things, of encouraging people to work together to find new ways of helping society... The intention is to throw up ideas and to make them work in a diverse partnership that stretches across the globe," he says. Under an RSA initiative, a British designers' forum has been working with Indian craftspersons and young people to create a completely new range of garments. "Arts and education must be the foundation on which we can build a decent, healthy society," says Britain based businessman Raj Loomba, who played a crucial role in establishing the RSA India chapter. "Arts and education can help to bridge the disadvantage of poverty. It can give young people the confidence to remove the barriers of discrimination," says Loomba, who is known to be close to British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
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Indian art is going global and is bringing not just accolades, but big money to its practitioners. In Britain, paintings by Indian artists have created the right kind of buzz in the rarefied circles of cognoscenti. A painting by Indian artist Frances Newton Souza bought in 1967 for 50 pounds has fetched its Devon-based owner a whopping 173,000 pounds.
I can't go on, says Beckett's Unnamable. I will go on. A writer's injuries are his strengths, and from his wounds will flow his sweetest, most startling dreams.
And Proust, too, killing himself to write his book comes close to the concept of dharma when, echoing Balzac, he says that in the end it's less the desire for fame than 'the habit of laboriousness' that takes a writer to the end of a work. But dharma, as this ideal of truth to oneself, or living out the truth in oneself, can also be used to reconcile men to servitude and make them find in paralyzing obedience the highest spiritual good. 'And do thy duty, even if it be humble,' says the Aryan Gita,
'rather than another's, even it be great. To die on one's duty is life: to live in another' death.
My discovery over the years is that the mother tongues have so much in them, so much that is alive, and are much more pervasive, in all strata of society, in all ages from children to the very old, men and women, literate and non-literate. What holds them together? It's not Sanskrit. It's these mother tongues. I think I went into linguistics because of that. That spoken languages had to be very, very important. It was important in my youth to have discovered this.
Writing is a concentrated form of thinking. I don't know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write about them. Maybe I wanted to find more rigorous ways of thinking. We are talking now about the earliest writing I did and about the power of language to counteract the wallow of late adolescence, to define things, define muddled expression in economical ways. Let's not forget that writing is convenient. It requires the simplest tools. A young writer sees that with words and sentences on a piece of paper that costs less than a penny he can place himself more clearly in the world. Words on a page, that's all it takes to help him separate himself from the forces around him, streets and people and pressures and feelings. He learns to think about these things, to ride his own sentences into new perceptions.
Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself. An artist is a creature driven by daemons. He doesn’t know why they chose him and he is usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.
I am trembling with cold