British couple's India art collection that includes works by Atul Dodiya & Anish Kapoor up for auction in New York

NEW DELHI: Delayed by the Covid-19 pandemic, an art auction titled 'A Lasting Engagement: The Jane and Kito de Boer Collection' will go up for auction with over 150 Indian works this week. This is the largest and most important single owner sale of South Asian Modern + Contemporary Art says Christie’s and spans the late 19th century to the present day India.

The collection will be auctioned off live during Asian Art Week in New York on September 23.

Jane and Kito de Boer first purchased a painting on impulse while living in India, in the 1990s reflecting their excitement at the vibrancy and energy of India’s culture.


"Since then, collecting India’s art has become an obsession. It has come to shape our lives. Today our collection has over 1000 works of Indian art," they said.

The collection, which started as a way for the couple to understand and engage with India, where they were based in the 1990s, represents today one of the largest holdings of modern Indian art in private hands, comprising paintings, works on paper, photography and sculpture made over the past 120 years with a particularly strong representation of works from the Bengal School.

The first work in this collection, Ganesh Pyne’s painting, 'Lady before the Pillar', was acquired 25 years ago, in 1993, when the de Boers relocated to New Delhi.
The highlights of the auction include a suite of rare works by Ganesh Pyne dating from the 1950s to the 1990s, and works by Rameshwar Broota including the seminal 1982 painting, 'The Last Chapter'. It will also have works by Akbar Padamsee and MF Husain, alongside a selection of works from the Bengal School and artists like Francis Newton Souza, A. Ramachandran, Bikash Bhattacharjee and K. Laxma Goud.

Contemporary works in the auction will also include an important early painting by Atul Dodiya as well as works by Anish Kapoor, Chittrovanu Mazumdar and Hema Upadhyay.

Deepanjana Klein, international director of the South Asian Modern and Contemporary Art department said, “The depth of this collection is a rarity in our field."