The contest of Durga & Kali

Two iconic Tyeb Mehta works coming up for sale at auctions show the enduring fascination for the artist, finds Gargi Gupta

International auction house Sotheby's will open its India auction late this year with a painting by Tyeb Mehta as its star offering. Done in 1993, it's a painting of goddess Durga slaying

Mahishasur in the artist's characteristic flat colour planes, in this case, green, saffron, blue and white, the colours of the Indian flag. Gautam Bhatia, MD of Sotheby's India, who helped source the painting from the collector who had commissioned Mehta to make it and has had it ever since, says it's "very important" in Mehta's oeuvre, as it was the first of his celebrated Mahishasura series.

The asking price? A minimum of Rs 20 crore. That's well shy of the nearly Rs 23 crore that Mehta's painting, 'Untitled (Woman on Rickshaw)', sold for at Christie's London sale in May last year, a record for the artist. But Bhatia hopes, that 'Durga' will best it.

Another painting that might make a similar claim is 'Kali', the cover lot of Saffronart's June 13-14 summer online auction, carrying a price estimate of Rs 18.9-25.2 crore. In size and provenance, important considerations in auctions, 'Kali' ticks the right boxes. It's the largest of the three standing Kalis that Mehta painted; and it was once in the collection of theatre director Ebrahim Alkazi. Furthermore, the 'Kali' series is auction blue chip, considering that two smaller works from it had set milestones in auction prices of Indian art. In May 2005, a 'Kali' head sold at a Saffronart for more than a crore rupees, the first Indian artwork to do so; while another 'Kali' was the first Indian painting to sell for more than a million US dollars at Saffronart's 2011 online auction.

What is it that makes Mehta such a favourite of the collectors?

Arvind Vijaymohan, chief executive of Artery India, an art market data and intelligence firm, flags some of his attractions. "Mehta had a limited practice. He was an artist of very high integrity, meticulous in his execution and not given to posturing or playing to the gallery. If he was not satisfied with a work, he ensured that it never reached the market. This makes him popular in serious quarters, though he has never been 'popular' across the board. Besides this, he had a strong and enduring connect with certain subjects – the struggle of good and evil, the forms of Kali, Durga, Mahishasur, etc."

Data crunched by Artery India shows that Mehta is number one on the list of Indian artists in terms of the value that their artworks have realised in auction since 1987. Works by him have collectively transacted for $91.1 million, followed by VS Gaitonde at $84.1 million. ?Such is the constant demand for Mehta, reports Vijaymohan, that ?in the past 22 months, his firm has facilitated the private sale of two of his canvases priced in the Rs 10 crore-plus range.

All this, say art market experts, is to be seen in the context of the recovery of the Indian art market in 2017 after GST and demonetisation, with the 'moderns' – the tag for artists like Mehta practising in the post-independence period – leading the charge. Auction turnovers were up 13-17 per cent last year, reports Sotheby's Bhatia, while Artery India's research shows that of the Rs 563.70 crore worth of Indian artworks that were sold at global auctions in 2017, the Moderns accounted for as much as Rs 501.8 crore.

This may seem to bode well for Mehta's works coming to auctions now. But Vijaymohan sounds a word of caution – works in the Rs 20 crore-plus range coming in such quick succession might be too much for the market. After all, there are only a handful of collectors with sufficiently deep pockets.