
Eagle-eyed Colin Gleadell has a great item today following up on Sotheby’s unexpectedly successful New York Modern and Contemporary South Asian art sale two weeks ago. The $6.5m sale found buyers for 91% of the lots. Gleadell identified one of the sellers. It turns out the the collector did very well for himself:
A Swiss collector who spent $75,000 in New York on four paintings by the Indian modernist artists, Maqbool Fida Husain and Sayed Haider Raza in the mid-to-late 1990s, cashed in at Sotheby’s New York in the Asian art sales this month when they fetched just over $2.3 million (£1.9 million) all told. That’s an average gain of 20 per cent each year.
Gleadell doesn’t give all the details due to space constraints. The four works are:
Maqbool Fida Husain Untitled (Four Women) (400—600k )$936,500
MF Husain, Shiva Pavarti (500-700k) $600,500
Sayed Haider Raza, Paysage (200-300k) $588,500
MF Husain, Untitled (Surya) (200-300k) $225,000
Cashing in on Indian modern art; Stein’s photographic legacy; a new audience for Old Masters (Telegraph)