Bought for $100 — barely Rs 8,000 — in Detroit in the 1980s, an artwork by one of India’s most influential modernists, F N Souza is estimated to sell for £500,000 (around Rs 5 crore) at an auction in Sotheby’s London on October 26.
Though the final selling price may be much lower or higher depending on bids, it’s quite a trajectory for a piece that was quietly hanging on the walls of an American collector for four decades. Oblivious to its value, the current owners submitted its details on the auction house’s online pricing platform, leading to its rediscovery.
Titled ‘Landscape’ (Red Building), the painting — which shows the English city’s rectilinear skyline — not only represents Souza’s brief yet significant affair with European cityscapes in the post-war 1950s, but also belongs to 1955, a landmark year that marked the beginning of his ascent in London following six years of rejection and strife.
It was in 1949, two years after he co-founded the era-defining Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group, that Goa-born Souza had left Bombay to establish himself in London. “The period from 1949-1955 was a hard one for Souza,” wrote acclaimed art critic Edwin Mullins in 1962, adding: “For those six years, he tried to interest London galleries in his pictures only to be told that they were not good enough. Once he and a friend carried an enormous picture from North Kensington where he lived to Bond Street, because a gallery had expressed a slight interest in his work, only to have it rejected and carry it all the way back to North Kensington”.
Souza’s breakthrough show in 1955 later earned him the patronage of wealthy New Yorker Harold Kovner and of Detroit-based founder of the London Arts Group, Eugene Ivan Schuster. Schuster would bring Souza and his paintings to America, where the artist would spend three decades before returning to India towards the end of his life. That’s how ‘Landscape’ — which was found illustrated in an artist’s inventory list from the Schuster Gallery archives alongside over 100 of the artist’s paintings — surfaced at a charity auction in Detroit in the 1980s and caught the eye of a collector.
Now, it’s come full circle. “Four decades on, it is returning to the saleroom, to be offered in London, the same location of the artist’s great European breakthrough back in 1955,” said Ishrat Kanga, head of modern and contemporary South Asian art sales at Sotheby’s London.
