High Bid: Sagar at the Podium
At Christie's New York auction of Indian art, 26-year-old Mallika Sagar broke the glass barrier several times over.
Young, pretty and confident, Mallika Sagar strode up to take the podium - and the gavel - in a room full of art connoisseurs in New York recently. The occasion was Christie's auction of contemporary Indian paintings. The 26-year-old unassumingly broke the glass barrier several times over that October day. For never before had Christie's employed a woman to auction contemporary Indian art. And Sagar earned the distinction of being the first woman auctioneer of Indian origin at Christie's.
"I wasn't really nervous. It was just a wholly different atmosphere," Sagar smiles. "The positive energy in the room and knowledgeable bidders made the process specially exciting because we set three world records for Indian paintings."
Sagar may well give credit to the buyers, but she spun her own brand of charm at her first-ever auction to create the three records. A large Sayed Haider Raza work (La Terre), estimated to sell between $20,000 and $25,000, actually went for $50,000! An untitled Vasudeo S. Gaitonde canvas, which was estimated between $12,000 and $18,000, was snatched up for $45,000. And a figurative 1959 Ram Kumar went under the hammer at $35,000 - far beyond expectations that it would fetch $15,000-20,000.
The canvases of Raza, a living master of Indian contemporary art, and Gaitonde, a renowned abstract artist who died in August, attracted many Indian-American bidders, some on the telephone which Sagar handled with the professional panache that three years at Christie's gave her. Now, Sagar is Christie's India representative and is based in Mumbai.
But it was a step at a time. After a sound base at Cathedral School in Mumbai, Sagar went to boarding school at Suffield Academy in Connecticut. A major in history of art in 1998 from Bryn Mawr College in Philadelphia, a 116-year-old institution, put her on her career track.
Then it was time for her to understand all facets of the business: the art, marketing techniques and much more. A year's rigorous training did the trick followed by work with Christie's Indian and Southeast Asian department in New York and on a construction project "responsible for putting together the brand new offices here at Rockefeller Center".
Training also involved being aware of regulations and auction procedures that are announced before every sale as a requirement of the Department of Consumer Affairs in New York state, where the state's sales tax and buyer's premiums are applicable. Christie's charges a premium to the buyer on the final bid price of each lot sold.
But it took a little more to actually auction. "I practiced a lot to talk in public in front of a room full of people though it is not like acting in a play or being in a debate," she says. "But every situation is different, every lot of sculpture or paintings has a different background, and we try to anticipate every kind of scenario."
Interestingly, all the Husain paintings at the New York auction fared very well, proving yet again that M.F. Husain, at 86, continues to remain popular. Sagar, a specialist in 20th century paintings (contemporary painting) says, "Husain's works, prior to the 1960s and '70s, tend to have very good quality and are difficult to get." But for the first time since he executed the artwork, explains Sagar, the early Husains came on the auction lot and the bid prices were higher than normal because ownership was changing hands.
The youngest of four siblings from an industrial family, Sagar's achievements would show she prefers the number one.
—Raj S. Rangarajan
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