1. L’Homme Qui Marche (Walking Man 1) by Alberto Giacometti. This painting was auctioned last week by Sotheby’s in London, and fetched a record £65.7-million (R791-million).

2. Garcon a la pipe by Pablo Picasso was sold by Sotheby’s in New York for £65.6-million.

3. Dora Maar au Chat by Pablo Picasso. An anonymous Russian paid £60-million for this work at Sotheby’s in New York in 2006.

4. Adele Bloch-Bauer II by Gustav Klimt. This portrait was sold at Christie’s in New York in 2006 for £55.3-million.

5. New York Triptych (in three parts) by Francis Bacon. Russian oligarch and Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich bought the artwork in 2008 for £55-million.

6. Portrait du Dr Gachet (below) by Vincent van Gogh. This oil on canvas was sold in 1990 by Christie’s in New York for £52-million.

7. Le Bassin Aux Nymphmas by Claude Monet. One of the series of water lily paintings by Monet fetched £50-million at an auction in London in 2008.

8. Bal au Moulin de la Galette by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. This was sold at Sotheby’s in New York in 1990 for £49-million.

9. The Massacre of the Innocents by Sir Peter Paul Rubens. This biblical masterpiece was bought by Canadian press baron Kenneth Thomson for £47-million in London in 2002.

10. White Centre (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose – above) by Mark Rothko. In 2007 this work fetched £45-milllion in New York.

One of India’s big name artists collaborates with a Mumbai serigraph studio to make limited edition prints of Burman’s fine art over silk threads.

Lavesh Jagasia of The Serigraph Studio, honored Indian artist Sakti Burman, and Mumbai’s old Pundole Art Gallery in Fort took three years to complete an exhibition of limited edition serigraphs titled The Complete Collection by Sakti Burman which launches in Mumbai today. They will go to show in Chennai, Bangalore, New Delhi and Kolkata.

Whenever an artist print-maker produces an original stencil print using the hand-held screen-printing method these are classified as serigraphs — the medium for this exhibition. In Latin ’seri’ means silk and in Greek ‘graphos’ means to draw, hence the word ’serigraph’ literally means to draw through silk.
“I am very enthusiastic towards this new dimension to the art world,” Jagasia says. “After doing a thorough research of the visual arts scene in the developed and mature art markets, the obvious answer was serigraphs as this type of print offers a wide colour spectrum and by virtue of the inks being applied layer by layer it gives a perspective and depth to the images. These prints are regarded as ‘multiple originals’ by the artist. The market for multiple originals is huge and here to stay.”

You can assume Jagasia knows what he’s talking about. The list of artists he’s collaborated with at The Serigraph Studio include Indian masters such as S.H. Raza, Paritosh Sen, Jogen Chowdhury, Ram Kumar, Jehangir Sabavala, K. G. Subramanyam, Rameshwar Broota, Ganesh Haloi, Lalu Prasad Shaw and Manu Parekh among others.

The 24 limited edition serigraphs for sale at this show are based on choicest Burman paintings encompassing the last two decades of this legendary painter’s artistic evolution. Burman’s harmonious merging of imagery from the east and west comes naturally to an Indian artist who has lived most of his life in Paris, but is profoundly in touch with his Indian roots.

Sadequain is arguably responsible for the renaissance of Islamic calligraphy in Pakistan. A review of the history of calligraphic art in the country during the decades of the 1950s and ’60s reveals that there was minimal activity in this genre of art form. Syed Amjad Ali wrote in his book, Painters of Pakistan, that after Sadequain’s first exhibition of calligraphies in December 1968, “For next fifteen years or sixteen years, a veritable Niagara of painterly calligraphy flowed from his pen and brush. He initiated painterly calligraphy and set the vogue for it in Pakistan.”

Calligraphic art had enjoyed a revered status in the subcontinent, reaching its pinnacle during the glorious days of the Mughal Empire. But after the downfall of the empire, calligraphic art fell so far out of favour that in post-partition Pakistan, it was considered to be a mere vocational skill and not a serious genre of creative art. Searching for a new form of expression, Sadequain commemorated Ghalib’s anniversary by illustrating his poetry in 1968. To enhance the paintings, he inscribed Ghalib’s verses in Urdu to append the paintings, and that experiment later led to more calligraphic inscriptions in the Arabic language.

In a manner similar to his figurative paintings, Sadequain followed the same principles in his calligraphic art. His calligraphies represent the most radical departure from the established norms for hundreds of years. The centuries-old guarded traditions, watchful eyes of the religious police, or pitfalls of the uncharted waters did not deter him from going where few had ventured before him. He invented his own iconography and produced a dizzying array of calligraphic marvels at such large scales that had not been witnessed in recent history. His art became the most effective ambassador for the country and his impact was so profound, that on a number of occasions, Pakistan was represented in international forums only by Sadequain’s masterpieces.

Special mention must be made of some of Sadequain’s major works, which are spread over Pakistan, India, and the Middle East. He inscribed four versions of complete sets of the beautiful Verse, Sura-e-Rehman; the first two versions of the Verse, which consisted of 31 panels, have been preserved, one at Staff College Lahore and one with a private collector. Another version, consisting of 40 panels was painted on transparent cellophane. The fourth version of the Verse was painted on marble slabs, which Sadequain gifted to the citizens of Karachi in a ceremony held on the lawns of the Frere Hall in 1986. The intent was to place the complete set of 40 marble slabs on permanent display at the Gallery Sadequain of Frere Hall. But soon after Sadequain passed away, all forty panels disappeared from the premises, leaving no trace behind.

During the early 1970s, Sadequain completed several large calligraphies for the historic Lahore Museum, and gifted them to the citizens of Lahore. Eight of these large calligraphic panels, each measuring approximately 20 x 20 feet, are on display in the Islamic Gallery of the museum. He also inscribed Sura-e-Yaseen on to a wooden panel measuring 260 feet long and gifted it to the Islamic Gallery of the Lahore Museum. A large calligraphic mural adorns the power station at Abu Dhabi, which Sadequain completed in 1980.

During his stay in India, end of 1981 through 1982, Sadequain painted several large calligraphic paintings and murals. One of the most significant calligraphic works was the rendition of the 99 panels of Asma-e-Husna (the beautiful names of God) that he inscribed on the circular wall of the rotunda, which towers an imposing five stories high in the Indian Institute of Islamic Studies at Delhi. This rendition of 99 panels is one of the three complete sets he finished in his life. In addition to the calligraphic work at the Indian Institute of Islamic Studies at Delhi, Sadequain painted or sculpted calligraphic works at Aligarh Muslim University, Ghalib Academy, Jamia Millia, and the tomb of Tipu Sultan. In his customary practice, Sadequain gifted all this work to the Indian authorities. In addition to painting the murals and calligraphies in India, he exhibited his works at Delhi, Lucknow, Hyderabad, Aligarh, Banaras, and several other cities.

Mrs. Haas, widow of Walter A. Haas Jr., led the family foundation, the Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Fund, which has contributed more than $364 million to hundreds of community and cultural organizations that make the Bay Area what it is. They include the San Francisco Symphony, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the restoration of Crissy Field and The Chronicle’s Season of Sharing Fund. The Haas family also owned the Oakland Athletics from 1980 to 1995, a period cherished, and missed, by many Bay Area baseball fans.

Friends and civic leaders said that Mrs. Haas was as comfortable wading in a trout stream or walking around Crissy Field as she was enjoying a concert at Davies Symphony Hall or perusing an exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She was passionate about those interests, but more concerned that everyone would get to share them.

“She didn’t like to talk about her philanthropy,” said Ira Hirschfield, president of the foundation. “What was really important to Evie was that it make a difference and touch people’s lives in tangible ways.

“It was about leveling the playing field so that all families could live and raise their families with equality and dignity, to make sure all families had an equal chance to enjoy their lives,” he said.

Greg Moore, executive director of the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, said that desire was what drove Mrs. Haas to lead the effort to restore Crissy Field, which was completed in 1999. “Today it is just a beautiful place, which is what she wanted – to create a beautiful place that everyone could use and enjoy.”

From the time she studied for her bachelor’s degree at Wheaton College in Massachusetts, Mrs. Haas had a passion for the arts. After she and her husband married and moved to San Francisco in 1940, she grew to love the Symphony and SFMOMA. She was a longtime leader on the museum’s board, and she and her husband were instrumental in raising the $95 million to build the new museum in 1995. He died later that year.

“SFMOMA was the love of her life – except for her husband, Walter, and her children,” said Elaine McKeon, former president of the museum. “But she was just the sweetest person, interested in everyone she met. She was a real mentor to me.”

San Francisco Symphony music director Michael Tilson Thomas said Mrs. Haas, who served on the Symphony board for 40 years, loved classical music and wanted others to learn to love it, too. She helped to do that by funding “Keeping Score: MTT on Music,” a classical music program for children on public radio, television and the Internet.

“You got the impression from Evie that she had a real passion and interest in the Symphony, that it was a delight for her and that she wanted to share it with other people,” Thomas said.

But Haas didn’t confine her interests to the arts and philanthropy. She was an avid fly fisher – an interest she picked up from her husband. In 1979, she co-authored the book “Wade a Little Deeper, Dear,” considered a classic among fly fishers.

“I met her through her foundation,” said John McCosker, senior scientist at the California Academy of Sciences, and a friend, “but I also knew her because she and Wally were mad about fly fishing. That was a side of her most people didn’t know.”

Mrs. Haas is survived by her three children: Robert D. Haas, chairman emeritus and past CEO of Levi Strauss & Co., and his wife, Colleen Gershon Haas; Betsy Haas Eisenhardt, civic leader and volunteer, and her husband, Roy Eisenhardt; and Walter J. Haas, co-chairman of the Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Fund and past chairman and CEO of the Oakland Athletics, and his wife, Julie Salles Haas. She is also survived by six grandchildren, Elise Haas, Jesse Eisenhardt, Sarah Eisenhardt, Simone Haas Zumsteg, Charlotte Haas Prime and Walter A. Haas III; great-grandson Andy Zumsteg; and great-granddaughter Olivia Evelyn Prime.

Aloni was the featured artist on the first-ever art exhibition recently organised by Standard Chartered Bank Qatar. Bank officials, parents, children and guests attended the successful one-day exhibition held at Standard Chartered D-Ring Road Branch.

Phad painting is a traditional Indian art form based on an epic in praise of the good deeds of King Pabuji. It is derived from the word ‘par’ which literally means ‘scroll’ in the local language. The scroll painting which was originally about 15ft in length and four to five feet high was used by storytellers to narrate the epic.

“This art form is not commonly known since it was restricted to one part of India,” Aloni explained.

She said the art form has been preserved through family tradition passing it from one generation to another but is threatened to disappear because very few artists nowadays practice the art form since it requires a lot of patience to make and does not guarantee good financial rewards.

Using hand made brushes and natural colours sourced from India, Aloni creates her paintings following very detailed style for them to look authentically phad. Her wide collection spans 10 years of dedication to the traditional art.

‘Scenes from the Palace’, ‘Procession of King’ and ‘Mythological Elephant’ were some of Aloni’s notable paintings exhibited during the exposition.

Apart from being a professional artist, Aloni also teaches painting to children, from whom she said she derived much inspiration from.

An exhibition of dozens of works by the children was also held. The paintings revolved around a theme on French Art following the technique of legendary French painter Rousseau.

The paintings depicted animals, forests, flowers, sun, moon and other objects of nature. Collage and paper mache art including glass, tile and ceramic paintings were also put on display.

“For more people to appreciate this art form, artists should make it simpler, such as lessening the number of characters for each painting,” Aloni said, as she showed examples of silk paintings in which she focused on just one central character.

The impulse for the exhibition is both laudable and negative. The very rich presence (both past and present) of photography in south Asia has many aspects which do not fit into patterns dictated by the history of photography as written in Europe and the United States. So this exhibition, unlike many earlier, seeks to show only works by photographers from the region and to allow their expressions of cultural values to be heard in their own context. This is worthy enough, but it is lopsided. From the earliest days of photography in the mid-19th century, its development on the subcontinent was influenced by developments in Europe. To try to look the other way is perhaps a necessary shove to a pendulum which has been stuck on the Eurocentric side for too long, but it is an adversarial position and not a neutral scholarly one.Spread over two floors of the large gallery space, the show looks oddly drab on the lower floor and much more lively above. It is arranged thematically and not by date, and the curators follow five threads (the portrait, performance, the family, the street, and the body politic). These are more or less arbitrary, and they intersect often.

The grouping allows for lively comparisons, and provides a minimum of necessary guidance to European viewers in a maze of mostly new names and stories. But the stories, in truth, are better told in the book which accompanies the exhibition. On the walls are lots of pictures with minimal context, a kaleidoscope of snippets.

It is full of fascinating and lovely things. Here is a doorkeeper from the 1880s by the great Lala Deen Dayal, tiny against his massive studded door, with the sweep of shadow across the great door matched by the sweep of his dark cloak across his belly. Here is an exciting construction from 2007 by Rashid Rana in which the repeating pattern of the surface treatment of the twin towers in New York is made of thousands of little views of street-scenes in Lahore – Rana’s point being that the great shining vertical cities are often made by the labour of those who live in the sprawling dusty horizontal ones.

Here, too, is Umrao Singh Sher-Gil prancing about in his underpants on a bed in Paris looking like the villainous fakir in the “Tintin” books. Far from being a comic figure, however, Sher-Gil is of great importance in the story of Indian photography. Born to an aristocratic Punjabi family in 1870, he was a linguist and classical scholar as well as an enthusiast for craft skills like carpentry and calligraphy. He married a Hungarian opera singer and spent a large proportion of the 1920s and 1930s in Budapest and Paris, from where he brought back all that was newest in photography. But he had been an enthusiast for years: his early pictures date from the late 1880s, and he was perhaps among the very first in India to adopt the autochrome process of the Lumière brothers.

Umrao Sher-Gil was the father of the painter Amrita Sher-Gil (who died young in the 1940s) and the grandfather of the contemporary artist Vivan Sundaram. Both of these have a part to play in this exhibition, where Sundaram reworks his grandfather’s pictures by a form of computerised collage which is both a tender dip in the family archive and a more acerbic contemplation of the various parts taken by photography as catalyst or protagonist in personal identification.

The exhibition is full of links of this kind. A pleasing one is in the simple portrait by S.B. Syed from the 1850s of a woman hand-tinting a photograph. The presence of hand-tinting reminds us that the glorious tradition of miniature painting was not replaced by photography in India so much as teamed with it. Here, the meticulously detailed jewellery on the female sitter turns out to be the same as that worn by the artist who is seen painting it. Did the jewellery belong to the studio, to lend a certain social cachet to the fee-paying sitters? It seems likely. In Europe, gilding the photographic lily by hand-tinting fell (under modernist pressure) to the status of tastelessness. In India, not so.

To demonstrate that a separate photographic culture exists in India is the point of the show, and it does that well. It is to be hoped that it acts as an invitation to others to fill in the gaps, because this show, for all its vastness, is only a tentative beginning of a story that will continue to be told. It’s also a challenge to get full value from a show which achieves a great deal at the ultimate expense of depth

But recently Indian artists have, in some cases, lost over 70 per cent of their value, and some funds are failing to deliver promised returns. Osian’s fund closed at the end of last year, but not all investors have been paid; founder Neville Tuli told the FT that they will be paid by February 24 and admitted that the fund was “disappointing”. Osian’s is also mired in a US-based lawsuit with Christie’s, which it accuses of failing to deliver art it had bought; Menaka Kumari Shah, India representative of the firm, said: “We have been seeking to recover a significant debt from an Osian-related party for more than one year. Christie’s intends to review all of its legal remedies in response to these baseless allegations.”

The problem is not confined to art funds; Bodhi Art, one of India’s most flamboyant galleries, has become the highest-profile victim of the bust. At the height of its glory, the gallery had outlets in Berlin, Singapore, New York, Mumbai and New Delhi; now all are closed except Mumbai.

Next week, impressionist and modern art goes under the hammer in London. Christie’s goes first, on Tuesday evening with a 86-lot sale estimated at up to £80m, but the story is more about Sotheby’s sale on Wednesday. This is smaller, with 39 lots but a higher target of £102m, and it boasts three surefire winners. Giacometti’s imposing sculpture “L’Homme qui marche”, a lifetime cast from 1961 estimated at £12m-£18m, could shatter the world record for the artist. It is being sold by the German-based Dresdner, which was bought by Commerzbank last year. Cézanne’s “Pichet et fruits sur une table” (1893-94) is one of the artist’s highly desirable still lifes of apples and while it is unlikely to break the world record for Cézanne (£36.9m, made in 1999) it should still do very well at its estimate of £10m-£15m. The third cracker is a recently restituted Klimt landscape, “Kirche in Cassone” (1913), a highly attractive work with broad appeal, estimated at £12m-£18m.

Auction house specialists report a distinct loosening up of vendors’ willingness to sell, compared to last year. “We’re not talking about a return to boom times yet,” says Christie’s specialist Olivier Camu, “but buyers are buzzing around and general confidence is up.”

While some galleries may be downsizing, the international dealership Hauser & Wirth is expanding in the heart of Mayfair. The gallery has bagged the entire ground floor at 23 Savile Row, site of the former English Heritage headquarters. It will open this autumn with an exhibition of Louise Bourgeois. H&W will use the 12,500 sq ft space for larger shows, much as it did in Coppermill, the Shoreditch building where it exhibited Christoph Büchel and Martin Creed. The new gallery will bring H&W’s count of exhibition spaces to five, with New York, Zurich and three in London (its small Swallow Street space will be abandoned). So: Gagosian, eight; H&W, five, so far. The FT will publish an interview with H&W president Iwan Wirth in its collecting supplement on February 27.
“Nowhereville, USA” is one unkind description of Bentonville, Arkansas, but the town (pop: 20,000) boasts the headquarters of the world’s largest retailer, Walmart. And next year it will see the opening of Crystal Bridges museum, a $50m extravaganza masterminded by Walmart heiress Alice Walton (the sixth-richest American, says Forbes), who has been avidly collecting American art for 20 years. Some of her acquisitions have been controversial, for example when she swooped on Asher Durand’s landscape “Kindred Spirits” (1849) in a sealed-bid deal worth about $35m, whisking it away from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Washington, who wanted to keep the painting in public ownership. And she has made a $30m deal with the financially troubled Fisk University in Tennessee over shared ownership of 101 works from the Alfred Stieglitz collection, donated to the university by his estate, subject to a pending appeal by the Georgia O’Keeffe museum.

Crystal Bridges’ latest acquisition is less controversial: Walton Ford’s “The Island”, acquired from New York dealer Paul Kasmin for a sum “well in excess of $600,000”, according to the gallery. It is on display at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin (until May 24) while waiting for the completion of its new home.

Investors and collectors are different species. Which one of these are you?

For some time they had become interchangeable, the collector and investor in art, but as the market fragmented (when it was expected to consolidate), their domains have become exclusive of each other. The current environment is seen as buoyant for the collector as good quality works have returned to the market. For the investor, though, things look just a little grim, particularly since Forbes India’s damaging story on an art fund by Osian’s head Neville Tuli, it turns out, was artificially inflated before it bombed.

Here, then, are the differences between a collector and an investor. Read it with a pinch of salt.

COLLECTOR

# Is interested in particular works by an artist, or specific works of art.

# Would prefer the value of collected art to increase.

# Should the value of a painting or an artist move up, it’s fortuitous, a talking point in a group.

# Collecting is focused purely or loosely on a genre, period, medium, theme or specific artist(s).

# May occasionally sell works to enhance the perceived or academic value of a collection, or to turn around ill-chosen works.
# The collector is a constant visitor at galleries, artists’ openings, art fairs, talks and seminars.

# Collectors come as couples, are often women and only sometimes men. Institutions collect as well.

# Will invariably talk about art on social occasions — it’s a passion.

# Will likely beg, borrow or steal to buy a work they especially like.

# Collateral? “Well, I have this house…”

# If investments in art don’t rise, you won’t be entirely unhappy — there’s the art, at least, that you’d rather have.

# Unlikely to invest in an art fund: “I’d rather have the art.”

# Most likely to say: “Wow! That’s a treat. How much will it cost me?”

# Least likely to say: “I have too much art, I must get rid of some of it.”

# Will you look at that Souza!”

INVESTOR
# Has little or no interest in either an artist or specific works of art.

# Would definitely want the value of art in which he is invested to increase.

# The value of art must definitely move up, but it’s hardly a talking point.

# Collecting is driven purely by an index that factors in hedging of risks.

# Will definitely sell works as soon as the value is realised, as per a chalked-out strategy.

# The investor is rarely sighted at art events other than at talkathons about investment and value.

# Investors are more likely to be men (and sometimes women) from the financial world. Prefer institutional investing.

# Will never talk about art on social occasions — it’s just an investment.

# Will likely organise institutional funding for any purchase.

# The collateral is the art.

# If investments don’t rise, you’ll be anxious – owning the art is poor consolation and a reminder of your failure.

# Likely to invest in an art fund: “provided there is a guarantee of at least the principal and interest”.

# Most likely to say: “I don’t care who painted it, tell me how much it will fetch me three years from now.”

# Least likely to say: “I have too much money, I could buy art with some of it.”

# “Souza who?”

“It was an attempt by the Lalit Kala Akademi to unite the different cultural and art institutions in the city,” said Rm. Palaniappan, regional secretary of the Lalit Kala Akademi. “Generally, we all tend to function separately, but this time everyone accepted the proposal without hesitation.”

From January 18 onwards, camps in print-making, sculpture, painting and ceramics were conducted at the four institutions, with the artists of each visiting one another at the different locations and interacting with young, up-and-coming artistes of the city as well.

“Most of us work in the isolation of our studios, so this sort of opportunity to interact not only with artists in our own field but from others too was fantastic,” says Manisha Bhattacharya from New Delhi, who participated in the ceramic camp at Lalit Kala. “To suddenly be part of camps with artists I had grown up idolising, such as K. Laxma Goud or Dakshinamoorthy, was an honour.”

For Akhilesh, the renowned indian  painter from Bhopal, it was almost like an “exchange programme.” “It was a chance to see, discuss our personal ways of looking at art, and learn from the way others work,” says the senior artist who was part of the painting camp conducted at DakshinaChitra. “I was particularly keen to look at the work of young artists in the city, and visited the group at Lalit Kala. What was interesting was the independence of their identity and the diversity of their expression, in spite of working together.”

This year also saw the Lalit Kala Akademi’s private collection of artworks from five years of camps and workshops in the region on display at their premises. The exhibition, concluding today, features a gorgeous collection of paintings, ceramics, sculptures and graphics in a variety of styles reflective of different regional schools and the artists’ own personal visions. A brilliant mix of colours, textures and media, this collection truly serves as a compendium of creativity for the region.

Looking ahead, Lalit Kala Akademi hopes to make National Art Week an annual event, not only in Chennai but in other cities as well, as a nationwide celebration of art and creativity. “In addition, we want to extend the format to include the city’s art galleries and the corporations that support art, and add symposiums, curated exhibitions and retrospectives of senior artists to the roster of events,” says Palaniappan.