B Prabha Shines at Pundole's summer paintings sale

Prabha was a significant artist of her times and one of the earliest Indian women artists who charted a successful career as well, at a time when not many Indian women were choosing the arts as a profession. Prabha was born in 1933 in Nagpur and studied at the Nagpur School of Art before obtaining a diploma from the prestigious Sir JJ School of Art in then Bombay, which was the alma mater of some of India's most successful artists of all times. The most captivating aspect of Prabha's vast oeuvre is her sensitive and engaging portrayal of common women, going about their daily chores with elan and grace. Besides common village folk, she also portrayed the urban working poor, chronicling their lives as well as bringing a sensitive eye to their difficult existence 

At the recently concluded auction of Indian art, The Summer Paintings Sale, by Pundole's from June 5-10, it was an interesting name that topped the sale by value. It was B Prabha (1933-2001), whose untitled oil on canvas from 1986 sold for Rs 40 lakh, against a pre-auction estimate of Rs 20 lakh – Rs 30 lakh.

Measuring 47 x 113 in. (119.5 x 287.2 cm.), it's a beautiful painting by one of India's foremost women modernists, who unfortunately remains unsung and relegated to the backwaters of every discourse.

In rich Indian hues and tones, the painting captures a daytime snapshot in a village, where four women with earthen pitchers on their heads are either going to fetch water or returning from the chore. They are on the edge of a hamlet at the centre of which lies a temple, its red flag stretched in the wind. The four bare-feet women seem to have stopped under the shade of a banyan tree, and look ruminatingly towards the hamlet and the temple. The women are young, their bodies taut and lithe with miles of daily walking, the rich brown of their skin also proof of their hard physical labour under the sun. They wear lovely, colourful ghaghra cholis, with their dupattas covering their heads and falling on the sides gracefully. Their well-spruced visages are in signature B. Prabha style, making it a charming work capturing an idyllic scene of an India long gone by, even by the time the artist came to make it in the late 1980s.

Besides being endearing, the picture also manifests the artist's mastery over the medium and technique, revealed through the depth of the picture, the lucid strokes bringing alive the flora and the human habitation in a non-descript village, and the overall naturalistic expression of daytime light and shade.

At the end of the Pundole's auction, this adorable canvas rested on top of the table, besting works by well-known masters such as M. F. Husain, F. N. Souza, Jamini Roy, and Ram Kumar to name a few.

Who was B Prabha?

B Prabha is a name lost to the popular contemporary memory of Indian art. The much-neglected museum shop of the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, does offer prints of some of her most captivating paintings but this seminal artist is almost erased from any mention of modern Indian art on any contemporary platform whatsoever. Her masterpieces keep appearing at auctions, like they did recently at Pundole's, but hide in plain sight as they are almost always overshadowed by the superstar artists such as VS Gaitonde, Tyeb Mehta, Husain, SH Raza, FN Souza and a few others.

Prabha was a significant artist of her times and one of the earliest Indian women artists who charted a successful career as well, at a time when not many Indian women were choosing the arts as a profession. Prabha was born in 1933 in Nagpur and studied at the Nagpur School of Art before obtaining a diploma from the prestigious Sir JJ School of Art in then Bombay, which was the alma mater of some of India's most successful artists of all times.

The most captivating aspect of Prabha's vast oeuvre is her sensitive and engaging portrayal of common women, going about their daily chores with elan and grace. Besides common village folk, she also portrayed the urban working poor, chronicling their lives as well as bringing a sensitive eye to their difficult existence.

Prabha's career followed in the footsteps of the first generation of those modern Indian artists who had broken free of British academic influences in Indian colleges to create a uniquely Indian vocabulary of modern art — creating new modern art for a newly-independent nation. Like many of these modernists, Prabha too sought inspiration from both European masters and classical Indian paintings. This resulted in works of highest quality that were executed with modernist, European sensibility but represented Indian subjects and sentiments. Among Indian painters, Amrita Sher-Gil (1913-1941) was a distinct influence on Prabha's art, while influence of the styles and sensibilities of A. A. Almelkar, S. B. Palsikar and N. S. Bendre can also be seen in her canvases.

Renowned nuclear physicist and founding-director of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Homi J. Bhabha, was an early collector of Prabha's art. She was married to fellow painter-sculptor B. Vithal, who was also an alumnus of Sir J. J. School of Art.

Prabha and the Art Market

Prabha may not be the superstar of the art market that she truly deserves to be, but her art has had its dedicated band of collectors, both in her life and even after her passing in September 2001. Her works regularly appear on the art market and almost always exceed the highest pre-auction estimates, pointing to the faith collectors continue to show in her works. She was a prolific artist and was well-collected even during her lifetime, which explains a steady outflow of her works on the auction circuit. For example, the top auction houses of Christie's and Sotheby's both record a sizeable number of Prabha works they have sold so far — nearly a 100 works each in the past three decades approximately.

The highest price achieved by any of Prabha's work in a public auction so far has been $90,000 (approx. Rs 70 lakh at current prices). This price was achieved by two of Prabha's untitled works individually, one made in 1964 and another made in 1986, at Christie's auction of Modern and Contemporary Indian Art in New York on 20 September 2006. Both are signature Prabha works, of village women at their chores, their elongated, lithe bodies symbolising the hard work that Indian rural women undertake in their daily lives.

Though her canvases featuring women are some of her most well-known, her landscapes are equally enchanting, showing the artist's increasingly abstract bent of mind, devoid as they are of realistic expression, instead focusing on forms, creating a lyrical, semi-abstract picture plane of a landscape in a minimalist language. These works render her one of the earliest modernist landscape artists of India, her creations bringing her at part with the finest works in the genre by Raza and Ram Kumar during their early years in France.Just like her inspiration N. S. Bendre, Prabha's works too, this writer believes, will in time reach a well-earned zenith.

(The writer is a New Delhi-based journalist, editor and arts consultant. She blogs at archanakhareghose.com)