Indian art started fetching staggering prices over the last decade or so. Some flabbergasting sales took place around and in 2015. There was again a bump up post COVID-19. And 2025 looks like it will be a record-breaking year. Have a look at 10 masterpieces that went for astounding amounts under the hammer, with prices quoted for what they sold for then.
Consisting of 13 panels illustrating a village pilgrimage, MF Husain’s Untitled (Gram Yatra), sold for a record-breaking ₹118.7 crores mid-March this year. The mostly unseen painting had hung in Oslo University Hospital for decades, before Christie’s auctioned it at New York’s Rockefeller Center. It was bought by an unamed institution, which turned out to be the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art.
Tyeb Mehta's 1956 Trussed Bull sold for ₹61.8 crores at the Saffronart's 25th Anniversary Live Sale a few days ago, this April, setting a new record for work by thes Kapadvanj, Gujarat-born, Sir J J School of Art-trained artist whose style was guided by Modernism.
At an auction in New Delhi by Saffronart, Amrita Sher-Gil's 1937 oil on canvas The Story Teller went under the hammer for $ 7.4 million or ₹61.8 crores in September 2023. The part-Sikh and part-Hungarian painter, who mainly painted women, felt this canvas was one of her top 12 best works.
A 1989 Sayed Haider Raza oil on canvas, titled Gestation, went for an eye-popping price tag of ₹51.75 crores at a Pundole's auction in Mumbai, in September 2023. The Babaria, MP-born artist lived in France but said in an interview to Rediff: "I am very attached to my memories, to my civilisation, our extraordinary tradition. My heart is in India."
An untitled oil on canvas painting from 1969 by V S Gaitonde collected ₹42 crores at a Pundole's Mumbai auction in February 2022. Born in Nagpur to Goan parents, a product of Mumbai's Sir J J School of Art, he was a badshah of the abstract, although he preferred to call it non-objective.
Tyeb Mehta's Bull on Rickshaw, 1999, an acrylic on canvas, went for $5,596,000 or ₹41.97 crores in April 2022 at Saffronart’s Mumbai spring live auction. This price included the buyer's premium. Mehta's obsession with bulls began after a never-forgotten visit to a Mumbai abattoir. Art authority Amrita Jhaveri interprets, 'the bull, with its fiery energy is inescapably doomed to man’s violence'.
At an August 2023 Pundole's auction in Mumbai, modernist painter Francisco Victor Newton de Souza's Hunger went under the hammer for ₹34.5 crores. He hailed from Saligao, Goa, but lived most of his life in Mumbai, studying at St Xavier's College and Sir JJ, but was expelled from both places (for obscene graffiti at Xavier's and pulling down the Union Jack flag at JJ).
Vasudeo S Gaitonde once topped the list of Indian artists with the most expensive paintings after an untitled 1995 one of his was bought by an anonymous buyer at a Christie's, Mumbai auction for $4,415,008 or ₹29.3 crores in December 2015.
This oil on board, painted by F N Souza in 1955, sold for a sum north of $4 million or about ₹26.9 crores at a Christie's New York auction in 2015. Birth is considered one of the most important paintings of the artist's career and was included in his first solo show at Gallery One in London.
Before Gram Yatra became Maqbool Fida Husain's most expensive painting this year, his Untitled (Reincarnation) fetched $ 3.1 million or approximately ₹25.7 crores in Sotheby's London in September 2024. The Pandharpur-born former Rajya Sabha member had a characterisitic MF-invented Cubist style. He exiled himself from India 2006 till his death in 2011 in London.