india

Updated: Nov 30, 2018 07:16 IST

For about five minutes, The Little Girl in Blue kept a room full of people silent at a ballroom at Taj Mahal Palace. Bids were coming in live, and via three telephones as the rest of the crowd waited on the edges of their seats.

It was Sotheby’s first physical auction in Mumbai, and this painting by Amrita Sher-Gil was one of two headlining lots. The other was Tyeb Mehta’s 1993 work, Durga Mahisasura Mardini. Neither has been auctioned ever before.

The Tyeb Mehta painting eventually netted the biggest bid—Rs 20.5 crore. Little Girl in Blue breached its estimate of Rs 12.5 crore and sold at Rs 18.7 crore.

In all, 60 lots went under the hammer at the Boundless: India auction in Mumbai. Two Air India posters, expected to get Rs 90,000, went for over Rs 10 lakh.

Eleven lots remained unsold by the end of the evening, and one lot was withdrawn, but total sales for the evening amounted to Rs 55.4 crore, which put Sotheby’s somewhere in the upper middle of their hoped-for-range of Rs 43.1 crore to Rs 62.9 crore.