Delhi: When an artist who died in relative obscurity commanded Rs 67.08 crore for an untitled abstract canvas this week, it was a big moment for Indian art. And yet another high point in the legacy of modernist VS Gaitonde, who avoided the spotlight all his life but has become a darling of auctions in the past decade.
The yellow canvas with subtle translucent forms is now the second-most expensive Indian artwork ever sold, after MF Husain’s Gram Yatra, which went for Rs 118 crore earlier this year. For many in the art world, Gaitonde’s rise represents the end of a “colonial hangover” in the global market.
Shatadeep Maitra, an art curator with Sabyasachi, said he was elated at the sale.
“When we were growing up, the art we were exposed to was mostly Western. We always assumed Picasso or Matisse fetching millions in a Western auction was a marvel. The same logic applies here.”
Twenty-four years after Gaitonde’s death, the oil-on-canvas from 1970 was sold at art auction house Saffronart’s 25th anniversary live evening sale in Delhi on Sunday. It fetched nearly three times its higher estimate, setting a new global milestone for Gaitonde, who is widely recognised as a pioneer of abstract expressionism in India. At the same auction, works by Amrita Sher-Gil (The Storyteller, 1937) and Tyeb Mehta (Trussed Bull, 1956) went under the hammer, along with contemporary artists such as Nalini Malani. With total earnings of Rs 355.77 crore, it was the highest-ever sale of South Asian art at a global auction.
But for Gaitonde, it’s been a trend. Over the last five years alone, several of his paintings have sold far above their estimated values, including three untitled works that fetched Rs 42 crore in 2022, Rs 39.98 crore in 2021, and Rs 36.8 crore (including buyer’s premium) in 2020 respectively.
Born in 1924 in Nagpur to Goan parents, Gaitonde grew up in a small three-room chawl. Despite his father’s opposition, he pursued a diploma in painting at JJ School of Art in Mumbai, funding his own education. In 1971, he received the Padma Shri for his contribution to art.
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Rebellion on the canvas
Gaitonde’s work was known for stretching the imagination. In the 1950s, when Indian art was dominated by traditional forms like Madhubani and Warli, he turned instead to global modernist influences. His paintings were a shift from the figurative to the abstract and ambiguous, and were often described as rebellious and adventurous.
A push came from his association with Bombay’s Progressive Artists Group—a collective that over the years also included the likes of MF Husain, FN Souza, and SH Raza—where new ideas were encouraged. And it opened a gateway for a new discourse within the Indian art world.
Termed a modernist, Gaitonde’s paintings captured the era by moving away from representation and toward minimalism.
Art critic Harold Rosenberg once called Gaitonde an “action painter” because his work disregarded the conventions of society.
In a questionnaire for a Museum of Modern Art exhibition of Indian art in New York in 1963, Gaitonde said that it was his experience of life that manifested on canvas.
“I work as an individual. I don’t have any scientific point of view. It is mostly my total experience of life and nature that comes through me, that is manifested on canvas. For me, every painting I do is a miracle…”
Another of his best-known works is Untitled (1969), a blue oil painting that sold for a then record Rs 42 crore at a Mumbai auction in 2022. Created at a time when he was deeply influenced by Eastern philosophies, its muted tones and textures reflected his commitment to abstraction as a means of evoking emotions in the viewer.
However, his work attracted criticism as well. Some critics regarded his art as detached from the socio-political realities of the country, and abstractionism itself was viewed as “un-Indian“.
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Speaking through silence
Gaitonde was a man of few words, averse to the limelight even when his work was making waves in the Indian art world. His friend and painter Krishen Khanna, in a 2015 Raza Foundation lecture, called him “choosy about who he should talk to”.
“He didn’t want to waste time, but he did waste his words on us. After a couple of drinks, he was very mellow,” he recounted.
It was not only painting that appealed to Gaitonde, Khanna added, but also literature, music and poetry.
“He listened intently to both European and Indian music. And his early paintings do reflect the kind of minimalism — like he would use a single monochrome and work on the inflections of that single colour.”
Khanna also stressed that Gaitonde’s bent for abstraction wasn’t a matter of lacking skill and that he would draw very precisely.
“He didn’t go abstract because he couldn’t draw. His serious work started in the mid-60s and it was bold. He did large areas in a single colour and then activated them with other forms. He was the only one doing it at that stage.”
But during his peak as an artist, tragedy struck. A severe auto accident in 1984 made it impossible for Gaitonde to paint large canvases. By 1998, he had retired from active painting.
In one of his rare interviews to Pritish Nandy in 1991, Gaitonde reflected on his paintings: “Everything starts from silence. The silence of the canvas. The silence of the painting knife. The painter starts by absorbing all these silences…”
In 2001, his death in Gurugram went largely unnoticed. But his paintings are once again speaking to the world.
(Edited by Asavari Singh)