Osian's Auction Catalogue The Masterpieces and Museum Quality Series | October 2004

THE MASTERPIECES & MUSEUM-QUALITY SERIES 15 FROM THE OSIAN’S FINANCIAL ARCHIVES As the art market grows the need for authentic and comprehensive knowledge & information becomes imperative. Having taken the responsibility of pioneering most of the changes in the art market hand in hand with building the knowledge-bases, it is now time we start sharing some of the financial data & our analyses with the public, especially given ‘art as investment’ becomes a more considered alternative investment. The effort of undertaking all the archiving and documentation is time–consuming and expensive, and it does not make sense for many to duplicate the effort. In this Issue we shall give select data regarding the O51AN, the first Index on Modern & Contemporary Painting. Further, an Analysis on an select individual artist, F.N. Souza, is given to show the kind of break-up some of the financial data is categorised into for study. Further, we present the first comprehensive list of all the Global Auction Benchmarks for Indian Contemporary Artists since 1987. O51AN The Osian’s 51-Art Index The Osian’s 51-Art Index (O51AN) is India’s first Index for Modern & Contemporary Indian Art. It has been collated from the complete database of sales in public art auctions on the subject, between December 1987 & August 2004, across the world. The sales from the following professional Auction Houses have been included: Bonham’s, Bowring’s, Christie’s, HEART, Osian’s, Saffronart.com & Sotheby’s. No charity auction & gallery sales have been included due to the lack of public accountability in these transactions. The total sales value from which the O51AN has been culled is INR 141.6 crores (Approx. $31.5 million) from 4150+ sale transactions. The O51AN group of artists cover over 85% of this value. The artists included in the index are as follows: J.Sultan Ali, K.H. Ara, Ramkinkar Baij, Prabhakar Barwe, Manjit Bawa, N.S. Bendre, B.Bhattacharjee, Nikhil Biswas, Nandalal Bose, Rameshwar Broota, Allah Bukhsh, Sakti Burman, Chittaprosad, Jogen Chowdhury, A.R. Chughtai, Biren De, M.V. Dhurandhar, Atul Dodiya, V.S. Gaitonde, Laxma Goud, Satish Gujral, K.K. Hebbar, M.F. Husain, George Keyt, Bhupen Khakhar, Krishen Khanna, Kshitindranath Majumdar, Hemen. Mazumdar, Tyeb Mehta, Anjolie Ela Menon, Sailoz Mookherjea, Akbar Padamsee, Sudhir Patwardhan, M.F. Pithawalla, Ganesh Pyne, Ramkumar, S.H. Raza, Rekha Rodwittiya, Jamini Roy, Jehangir Sabavala, Paritosh Sen, Amrita Sher-Gil, Laxman Shreshtha, Arpita Singh, F.N. Souza, K.G. Subramanyan, J. Swaminathan, Abanindranath Tagore, Gaganendranath Tagore, Rabindranath Tagore & Raja Ravi Varma. Table 1 The Top Ten Artists with the Highest Total Value of Transactions, 1987-2004, along with their respective ‘Liquidity Weightage’ (LW) are: M.F. Husain 20.83 F.N. Souza 7.04 S.H. Raza 6.78 Tyeb Mehta 6.24 A.R. Chughtai 6.04 Raja Ravi Varma 4.97 Ramkumar 3.84 Jamini Roy 3.08 N.S. Bendre 2.83 V.S. Gaitonde 2.54 Others 35.81 For the period January to August 2004, the LW for M.F. Husain was 23.26 while that of F.N. Souza was a rapidly rising 22.24, implying that these two artists alone constitute more than 45% of the total sales value for this period of time. Table 2 The Top Ten Artists with the Highest Average Prices (INR), 1987-2004, are: Tyeb Mehta 1,664,274 Raja Ravi Varma 1,528,801 A.R. Chughtai 1,036,616 Ustad Allah Bukhsh 811,223 Hemendranath Mazumdar 793,892 M.F. Husain 718,693 V.S. Gaitonde 693,051 Rameshwar Broota 643, 496 N.S. Bendre 628,951 Akbar Padamsee 595,519 Table 3 The Top Ten Artists with the Highest Average S.I.R., 1987-2004 are: Rabindranath Tagore 5,343.0 Abanindranath Tagore 4,903.0 A.R. Chughtai 3,518.0 Ganesh Pyne 3,456.0 Gaganendranath Tagore 3,217.5 Raja Ravi Varma 2,856.7 Nandalal Bose 1,634.8 M.V. Dhurandhar 1,460.8 Hemendranath Mazumdar 1,394.1 Ramkinkar Baij 1,286.7