The Valuer of Indian Art

For someone who entered the art world as the wife of a tech billionaire wanting to buy paintings for their new house, she has come a long way. A little over two decades since she bought her first artwork, Kiran Nadar has become arguably the most powerful figure in the Indian art scene. She has spent between $200 million (Rs 1,086.8 crore) and $250 million on some 600 works of contemporary art. That includes an estimated $3.5 million for Syed Haider Raza’s 1983 painting Saurashtra, and $2.6 million for Subodh Gupta’s 36-by-36 foot, 26 tonne LOC (Line of Control).

No other individual in the country has pumped this kind of money into the art market. According to The European Fine Art Foundation, Indian art purchases accounted for a mere 0.8% of the global art market in 2006, then valued at around $55 billion. Thus, when Nadar bought Saurashtra in 2010, it was inconceivable for a buyer to pay more than a million dollars for a Raza piece. The price she paid set a world record for Indian art, and raised its value in the eyes of the world. Sales of Indian artists now command around 3% of the international market.

Buying hugely expensive art is not her only claim to fame. Nadar, wife of HCL’s legendary founder, Shiv Nadar, has set up art museums and galleries, and her patronage is often enough to make an otherwise unknown artist hot property. “Where do you think buyers are taking cues from? From people like Kiran Nadar. Corporate sponsorship has grown exponentially as companies see people like Nadar participating,” says Neha Kirpal, founder of the India Art Fair, an annual event that has become a platform for contemporary art in Asia.

Ask Nadar about this and she shrugs, and then admits that over the years, she has understood that big buyers like her have a huge impact on a market like India, which has barely a handful of patrons. “When the market crashed [in 2008], I realised that if I didn’t bid at an auction, it created reverse ripples. I had never anticipated this negativity and that’s when I realised [my] importance.”

At the London Business School, Professor Nirmalya Kumar, one of the most avid collectors of art works of the Tagore family (Rabindranath and his nephews, Gaganendranath and Abanindranath) and Jamini Roy, points out the critical importance of Nadar in the Indian art market today via her purchases, for instance, of Gupta’s LOC. “Subodh Gupta is now almost a global artist. It is becoming incidental that he is Indian. That is an inflection point in the history of art in India and when an Indian collector buys the biggest piece from that artist, it shows the kind of confidence collectors have for Subodh’s work even in India,” he says.

Kumar adds that strong patrons have an influence on setting the value of art. Tasneem Zakaria Mehta, director of Mumbai’s Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum, explains the importance of patronage. “It is a fallacy to think that we have the struggling artist and the struggling artist will one day achieve fame. He has to sell to survive.” People like Nadar help in making an artist noticed, and so help sales.

Nadar’s successful bid for LOC reveals the irony of the Indian art market. Between 2005 and 2006, the world’s top two luxury billionaires, Bernard Arnault who owns LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton (LVMH), and François Pinault, the boss of PPR (soon to be renamed Kering), each bought a Gupta piece. Arnault bought Untitled 3, a 2 metre stainless steel bucket for Rs 49 lakh ($90,000) and Pinault bought Very Hungry God made of 1,000 kg of stainless steel pots, pans, and spoons for an estimated $1.5 million and placed it at the marquee spot in Palazzo Grassi at the Venice Biennale in 2007. In India, however, people sniggered at the idea of spending millions to buy, in effect, a bunch of old utensils.

“For years, everyone just spoke to me about money. How much is this painting worth, what is the price of that sculpture—money, money, money! Explaining my work in my own homeland has been the biggest challenge. Even today my biggest struggle is in India,” says Gupta. But, he adds, “When Kiran Nadar brings my LOC home, it opens people’s eyes here. I cannot teach everyone to see. I can only make the art. That support has to come from outside and that’s where a patron like Nadar comes in.”

Gupta’s wife, artist Bharti Kher, is equally vocal about Nadar’s contribution. “What Kiran has done is incredible. I have been very critical of the lacklustre work of the NGMA [National Gallery of Modern Art]—there is so much more that they can do. People like Kiran bring that sense of urgency and purpose to the market.”

In fact, Nadar’s 2010 purchase of Kher’s sculpture of a dying elephant, The Skin Speaks a Language Not Its Own, for $1.5 million, set the record for the highest amount ever paid for an Indian female sculptor. Nadar is the couple’s biggest patron, having set benchmark prices for both their works.

Critics argue that it’s easy to spend big bucks when you’re bankrolled by a billionaire (the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art is backed by the Shiv Nadar Foundation, which, in turn, is supported by the $6 billion global tech company, HCL). Some artists that Fortune India spoke to said that building art galleries is not enough to promote art.

Peter Nagy, who runs the Nature Morte triad of galleries in Delhi, Gurgaon, and Berlin, begs to differ. “The only way the market really develops is if there is a base of low-cost access to view, understand, and develop an interest. That can only happen if giant social institutions like museums and other public spaces are developed. It is only when people get to see and experience art that a new generation of buyers and collectors emerge. Who is creating those institutions? The individuals who do have the most impact on the market.”

Officially, India has around 700 museums but most are in a dismal state. For instance, last year, when the Orissa state museum celebrated its 55th anniversary, it had 50% vacancies. The government has just not been able to hire staff. In Bangalore, a National Gallery of Modern Art, along the lines of the one in Delhi, took seven years to complete, and another year to appoint a director. Meanwhile, the NGMA in Mumbai has been beset by politics—the interim director appointed last September is also the director of the Nehru Science Centre and has little experience with the arts.

Private philanthropists have taken steps to plug this hole. Suresh Neotia’s Jnana-Pravaha museum in Varanasi showcases his wide collection of Indian antiques; the Rakhi Sarkar-led Centre for International Modern Art is one of the foremost historical research driven art centres in the country; and the Devi Art Foundation of the mother-son duo of Lekha and Anupam Poddar has become the home for the best in contemporary art from the subcontinent. In Kolkata, Sarkar is working with the government to create a state-funded Kolkata Museum of Modern Art, or KMOMA, dedicated to showcasing modern Indian art, as well as promoting its study, and publishing documentation. The 61-year-old Nadar was one of the last to join this group.

Nadar has set up two museums, one in Noida, and the other in a­—gasp—mall in South Delhi. “When we first thought of it, many were appalled,” says Nadar with a laugh. “It was a simple Muhammad-and-mountain thing: if need be, the mountain must come to Muhammad! I will go where the people are.”

She’s now preparing to spend Rs 100 crore to build a 100,000 sq. ft. museum in Delhi. (Compare that with the NGMA in Delhi, India’s biggest and most visited museum, which is around 30,000 sq. ft.) Nagy says Nadar is the person who has had the greatest impact on the Indian art market. “Where is her equal, in terms of scale, of what she is doing?”

Art critic and curator of the Delhi Art Gallery, Kishore Singh, says strong collectors are able to bargain efficiently with a gallery because they have a strong sense of history. “No one can fool a Kiran Nadar in the market,” says Singh. “She knows what she wants, she knows what the value of the work is, and she will ensure that she gets it. Of course, that has an impact on prices because other buyers are watching Nadar to see not just what and who she is buying but also the price she is paying.”

The global art market is built on a base of numerous museums across the Western world. According to the European Group on Museum Statistics, which does data crunching on museums in the region, Germany has 6,500, while Britain has 2,500. Last calculated, the U.S. had more than 17,000. These attract millions of ticket-buying and donating tourists each year. In 2008, the most famous museum in France, the Musée du Louvre, home to the Mona Lisa, brought in $170 million in ticket sales and donations, about half its annual $350 million budget, with the rest paid by the government.

To understand the importance of serious supporters of Indian art, it’s useful to comprehend the swings that the Indian art market has gone through in recent times. From a tiny market that focussed on antiques, the Indian market grew to around $50 million by the late 1990s. Between 2001 and 2008, prices for most Indian artists rose by 150% and even 200% (though they continued to remain a fraction of global art prices). Artist Ram Kumar, for instance, was best priced at around $32,000 in 2003; by 2007, his top work was hitting $500,000, a jump of 1,462%. Since then, his prices have consolidated around the $200,000 mark. The market started peaking when Tyeb Mehta’s Mahishasura sold for $1.58 million (including buyer’s premium) at London auction house Christie’s, in 2005.

All this happened because a range of speculators—from hedge fund managers to non-resident Indians to profiteers out to make a quick buck—flooded the market. Lekha Poddar says she, Nadar, and Kolkata’s Sarkar were dismayed by what was happening. “It was the most unnatural way for the market to grow. There were people who had heard names and who, quite literally, were thinking, ‘This is the colour of my drawing room, what expensive art can I match it with?’ That was their criterion for buying.”

Others believed that art was a great investment, a notion that Kumar openly scoffs at. “[Art] is a highly illiquid asset which has no underlying revenue-generating stream but a host of fixed costs such as maintenance, insurance, and transportation. For every piece that shows big increases in price, there are hundreds that are sold once and then their value falls and no more is heard of them.”

Sarkar, who has been involved in collecting and supporting art for 40 years, says that the gold rush years made the role of the serious patron even more critical. “You need to understand how serious collecting happens. It happens by understanding the history of the artist, the history of the milieu in which they have worked, developing a sense of how their work has changed over the years, and figuring out the system by which galleries work steadily with artists and collectors to refine the pricing of an artist,” she says, adding that it is rare that the price of an artist will go up three-fold in the space of a few months. Art pricing in India is arbitrary, says Sarkar: “It’s all Chinese whispers.” There’s rarely a sound basis for setting prices. “A lot of the newer buyers are taken for a ride which is why serious patrons give a sense of the value of newer artists.”

That’s why people take notice when Nadar’s museum seems to do something new, such as spending more than Rs 1 crore to put up the biggest ever showcase of the work of Karachi-born artist Nasreen Mohamedi who died in 1990 in Baroda, at the age of 53. This is the first time a museum show of the minimalist artist has been done in India. This for an artist who is virtually unknown beyond artists in India.

Will Nadar’s patronage see a new interest in Mohamedi’s works? It’s difficult to say, but going by precedent, it could happen. Ask about her trendsetting ways and she laughs. “I had no desire to become a big collector or anything like that,” she says. “I don’t run a gallery. I don’t sell anything. I am building public institutions and I want them to be sustainable.”

But people are still not flocking to museums and art shows. “We get about 100 people a day in Saket [the museum in the mall],” says Nadar. “We want 1,000.” That’s why her next big move. “A museum that will be many times bigger. We will do things which will be even bigger. How long will they stay away?”