Authenticity of Indian works in university exhibition questioned

The withdrawal of four lots from a Christie’s sale in New York earlier this year has renewed scrutiny on a recent exhibition in London to which they were loaned. The four works—listed on the auction house’s website as by Abanindranath Tagore, Gaganendranath Tagore and the Early Bengal School—were shown in Painting Freedom: Indian Modernism and its Rebels (11 April-22 June) at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (Soas). A Christie’s spokesperson tells The Art Newspaper that the works were removed from the auction house’s South Asian Modern and contemporary sale, held in New York on 18 September, for “further research”, without elaborating further.

The Soas show surveyed Indian Modern art through three of its leading figures: Jamini Roy, Rabindranath Tagore and Hemen Mazumdar, alongside other 19th- and 20th-century artists and movements from the subcontinent. “There is a lot of discussion around ‘fakes’ in Indian art,” stated a wall text in the exhibition. “Unfortunately, there is no rigorous scholarship documenting the output of these artists.”

Around 85% of the more than 100 works in the show, almost all paintings, are owned by Nirmalya Kumar, a Kolkata-born business management professor and art collector based between India, Singapore and Switzerland. Around a dozen other private lenders provided the remaining works in the exhibition, according to a Soas spokesperson. Kumar has been collecting art since the mid-1980s, he tells The Art Newspaper, amassing one of the largest collections held outside India of works by Roy, Mazumdar and associated schools. “I’m a devotee to this field,” he says, adding: “There is not enough expertise on these artists.”

Multiple experts on these artists are expressing concerns over the authenticity of a number of works in the Soas exhibition, including three who are going public with their misgivings. Among them is Charles Greig, a British academic and expert in Indian art. Having viewed the show, Greig estimates that “at least 15” of the works are copies. He cites materials, styles, signatures and conditioning, as well as lack of shading and overall flatness, as his key reasons for believing so.

The most serious authenticity issues surround a subset of the dozen pieces in the exhibition attributed to Mazumdar, Greig says: “A side-by-side analysis of many of these works with the originals shows they are copies, and bad ones at that.” He claims that at least ten other works by unnamed artists, each one credited to either the Early Bengal School (late 19th century) or the Kalighat School (around 1850s-1930s), are also copies made at later dates.

Greig gives as an example the work Cat and Lobster, date unknown, saying of its condition: “It is too pristine. Kalighat works were made using the cheapest paint and on newspaper or another flimsy material. A work made in Kolkata in the early 1900s would be flaking and weathered, and not so well preserved.”

Greig’s issues with these works are counterbalanced by his enthusiasm for others in the exhibition. He says many are “genuine, and of good quality”, including “most of the Roys”, some of which are “among the best” he has seen. Still, he says: “I’ve never before seen so many copies that are fully attributed to the artist displayed in a public gallery.”

Shared concerns

Greig’s concerns are shared by Hemen Mazumdar’s grand-nephew, Samendranath Mazumdar, who works to preserve his great uncle’s legacy. (His wife, Anuradha Ghosh, is a Mazumdar scholar and the author of a 2017 book on the artist.) Although Samendranath Mazumdar did not attend the Soas exhibition, photographs he examined showed some of what he calls the most “identifiable signs” of a Mazumdar copy in the signatures of the works purportedly made by his great uncle. “Firstly, the artist always signed his last name ending in ‘dar’, not ‘der’, as is the case of many of the works in the Soas show,” he says. “Also, the size of the signature in Mazumdar copies is much bigger and [more] ostentatious than in the originals.”

A number of the works in the Soas show appear to be copies of well-known works that have appeared at leading auction houses. An oil painting attributed to the Early Bengal School, labelled as Untitled (Parvati and Ganesh) and dated to between 1850 and 1910, looks nearly identical to Untitled (Ganesh Janani), an Early Bengal School oil painting dated to the late 19th century that the collector Kiran Nadar bought from a Christie’s sale in New York in September 2021. Nadar confirmed to The Art Newspaper that she still owns this work and did not lend it to Painting Freedom. Another piece displayed at Soas, titled Daydreamer and fully attributed to Mazumdar, closely resembles an untitled Mazumdar work sold in a 2012 Sotheby’s auction in London.

“I am confident in the authenticity of the work that featured in the Sotheby’s auction in 2012,” says Yamini Mehta, an independent adviser who was Sotheby’s international head of Indian and South Asian art between 2012 and 2020. “It was well-researched at the time and displayed the age, condition, signature and delicacy of technique one would associate with Mazumdar’s works.” She says the corresponding piece in the Soas exhibition, which she viewed in person, “is a parody and worth comparing side-by-side”.

Mehta has closely handled numerous works by the artists in the show. “There are multiple art historical opinions about these works, but this exhibition does indeed raise questions, especially as a number of works featured seem to be copies of works that have been previously published or are in public collections. It behoves an educational institution such as Soas to perform their requisite due diligence on the works and the collections they display, especially when there are strong opinions and potential controversies at large.”

Other trade professionals have raised doubts anonymously, as well. The Art Newspaper understands that a leading dealer of Indian Modern art contacted Soas in the lead-up to Painting Freedom to ask the institution to reconsider staging the show.

Lender’s defence

Speaking to The Art Newspaper at Soas, Nirmalya Kumar asserted that the artists in this show made numerous copies of their work. Moreover, as a “stickler for conditions”, he says he has “painstakingly restored” the works that appear unweathered. He cites a number of major institutions that have borrowed from his collection, including Tate Britain and the National Gallery Singapore, as evidence to support the authenticity of his entire collection. (Kumar also offered to have a scientific analysis conducted on a work from his collection at a “lab of our choice”.)

Kumar added via email: “Both Roy and Mazumdar would repeat many of their most popular works in different sizes and media” in “an opportune, market-based response”. He continued: “I’m not entirely sure what is meant by ‘original’ in this content­,” continuing, “certainly I am not saying that I think they are either unique/one off, or the first of their kind. Roy, Mazumdar and the Kalighat and Early Bengal Schools repeated the same image and rarely dated the paintings, and works in my collection are attributed to those artists on that basis, where the evidence suggests that such an attribution is justified. As Howard Hodgkin once jibed about Jamini Roy, ‘You could have the image in any size: small, medium or large.’”

Samendranath Mazumdar, however, contests the notion that his great uncle frequently made replicas or multiple versions of his pieces. “I can tell you from my experience that he might have made one or two copies of his very few famous works in oil,” Mazumdar writes to The Art Newspaper. “But it cannot be ‘many copies of his many works’. I have never come across such a thing in my life.”

As for provenance, Kumar says he acquired most of the Mazumdar pieces in the Soas show from “one princely home in India where Mazumdar had a studio”. He adds that most of the Bengal School and Kalighat works were bought at auction overseas and have not been in India since the mid-20th century, “which explains why their condition is so good”.

Kumar says he did not financially compensate Soas in exchange for staging Painting Freedom. For this presentation, Kumar worked with two curators: Crispin Branfoot, a lecturer at Soas, and the independent curator Caterina Corni, who has staged a number of shows drawn wholly or partly from Kumar’s collection. Although both curators defended the exhibition to The Art Newspaper, their comments also acknowledged that uncertainties persist about the provenance and authenticity of at least some of the objects included.

Curators’ rebuttals

Branfoot says that the works in this show have been through an authentication process that includes “a triangulation of provenance, expert eye and technical analysis. The collection is well-catalogued and largely, if not wholly, previously published. Scientific analysis of pigments is expensive and not practical for works which are not relatively valuable or watercolours. But we did conduct Raman spectroscopy for representative work on one Hemen Mazumdar and one Early Bengal oil painting from the same provenance. The red in the Hemen signature and the green in the early Bengal oil tested as coming from Britain and the Netherlands, respectively. They were available from a single artist supplies store in Kolkata. Both these paints were discontinued in the 1970s”.

Branfoot adds: “Given the interest and significance of the period, there is known scepticism for the authenticity of some art from this period. As you may know, debates on authorship are a frequent occurrence in the world of dead artists. We have been explicit about inviting further comments and research. As an academic institution with no commercial interests in art, we can take a research perspective.”

According to Corni, a number of Mazumdar works intended to be included in the Soas show were removed before it opened due to doubts about their authenticity. Corni says that she does not want to proclaim that she is “entirely sure about the authenticity of the Mazumdar works” that remain in the exhibition, as “she is not a specialist on Mazumdar”. Nonetheless, she is cited as a “Hemen [Mazumdar] expert” in a 2021 book published for an earlier version of the Soas exhibition, which was held that year at the Leicester Museum and Art Gallery with the same title.

The same publication also contains a 16-page chapter on authenticity, written by Kumar, that takes aim at the “whispered conspiracy theories related to the ubiquity of fakes in Indian art”.

There is no suggestion of wrongdoing by any owners or exhibitors of the disputed works. The doubts raised speak to the authenticity issues have long plagued the field of Modern Indian art. Such issues intensify when those markets heat up—and prices for Indian modern art are currently skyrocketing.

“Copies proliferate when there is value,” Mehta says. “Especially in a poor country like India, which has a tremendous amount of artistic talent.”