Osian's Auction Catalogue Indian Modern and Contemporary Art | January 2008

106 Mukund and Neerja Lath Collection Lots 77 - 94 K.H. Ara Lot No. 77 Lot No. 78 M.F. Husain Lot No. 79 Tyeb Mehta Lot No. 80 Akbar Padamsee Lot No. 81 Ambadas Lot No. 82 Satish Gujral Lot No. 84 Arup Das Lot No. 83 Shyamal Dutta Ray Lot No. 85 Ganesh Haloi Lot No. 86 The art and love of collecting will always have those gentle souls whose predominant motivation is a journey of joy, a surrender to the process where few consequences are relevant and most obstacles are equally irrelevant. Mukund and Neerja Lath have poured over forty years of love and aesthetic delight into quietly building a significant collection, which somehow found itself revolving around their wonderful selection of Ganesh Pyne’s. In those days (early 1970s) when Prokash Kejriwal could not give away Pyne’s work to friends or well-wishers, Mukund and Prokash found in this master artist a unique dark vision needing to be supported and collected. Today Woman Smelling a Flower (1977), one of the great paintings has finally come up for sale thirty years on. As with most collectors, many purchases were made by chance at first and thereafter thought gathered a more deliberate momentum, as shapes came and left to build and re-build the collection. Today, as their children reach the age of wishing to build a life with differing focii, a few jewels of the collection have been offered to Osian’s for sale. I hope the emerging and seasoned collectors will take this rare opportunity to purchase one of the key works offered for sale, from Tyeb Mehta’s Two Brothers (1961) to Ganesh Haloi’s Reflections ( c .1976) to Subodh Gupta’s early work, Cat (1990) which barely found a handful of admirers at Rs.1000 but a decade ago. Osian’s is proud to sell these paintings with the hope and effort that some of the finest collectors of the world will make these works part of their growing collections, bringing that same love and gentleness to the process that the Lath’s have so elegantly and humbly sustained over the last forty years. The knowledge, joy and compassion which underlies Mukund’s eye is that which defines a true aesthete, one whose passion today finds a certain detachment, allowing a calm parting from those that have shared daily space and atmosphere, growing with the family, breathing in all the experiences, adorning the walls which energized the day to always just go that extra, bringing joy to all those around. They have received and absorbed the love from art as easily as they share the love with others. Nothing more can be expected from the journey.