A Market Transcendent: Demand for Himalayan Bronze Is on the Rise

LUCIAN HARRIS | SEPTEMBER 20, 2015 blouinartinfo

The devastating April earthquake that shook the mountainous Himalayan country of Nepal, killing many thousands and reducing ancient temples and shrines to rubble, brought an unwanted reminder of the profound historical, religious, and artistic importance of the Kathmandu Valley. In its unique and sacred Hindu and Buddhist landscape can be found seven separate World Heritage Sites, a concentration of monuments unmatched anywhere else in the world. Yet a month before the earthquake hit, Nepalese art was already in the headlines on the other side of the globe, as art market prices for Himalayan Buddhist treasures reached new highs in the latest round of auctions amid a spate of seizures of stolen art.

Over the past few years, demand for Buddhist art has rocketed, driven primarily by the new generation of superrich Chinese collectors obsessed with reclaiming parts of what they consider their lost cultural heritage.

New York has traditionally been a major hub of the market for South Asian,
Himalayan, and Chinese antiquities. In recent years the city’s dealer-led Asia Week initiative, arranged around the March auctions, has exploded into an event-filled jamboree organized to accommodate a free-spending nine days of antiquities shopping among this new and burgeoning Chinese clientele.

This year, all eyes were on a seven-part auction at Christie’s of Chinese, South Asian, and European antiquities belonging to the late Robert Hatfield Ellsworth, a New York dealer and connoisseur known as the King of Ming. At this prodigiously hyped, 2,000-lot marathon sale, which recalled the giant collection auctions of an earlier age, the star Himalayan object was a two-foot-high gilt-bronze image of Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion, a spectacular example of 13th-century Nepalese sculpture that once stood on a mantelpiece in Ellsworth’s 22-room Manhattan apartment. The $8,229,000 paid by an anonymous, but almost certainly Chinese, bidder went far beyond the $3 million high estimate, setting a new record price for a work of art from Nepal. Like many of the pieces on offer, it had originally been in the pan-Asian collection assembled by financier Christian Humann in the 1970s and bought by Ellsworth after Humann’s death in 1981.

“The Ellsworth collection was unique,” says Sandhya Jain-Patel, head of the Indian and Southeast Asian art department at Christie’s New York. “I don’t think we will see anything like it again.”

For Chinese collectors, Buddhist art is an increasingly fashionable alternative to the overheated contemporary art market. The rise of Chinese nationalism and the re-embracing of traditional culture that was once so brutally repressed by the Cultural Revolution have made the reclamation of the spiritually and artistically rich heritage of esoteric Himalayan Buddhism an attractive counterpoint to rampant 21st-century materialism. More than anything else, this new taste has focused on the patronage of the third and fifth emperors of the Ming Dynasty, Yongle and Xuande, who embraced Tibetan Buddhism during the first half of the 15th century. Their rule heralded a rich phase of imperial patronage and cultural florescence that saw the construction of the Forbidden City in the new capital of Beijing.

Yongle artists, if not actually Nepalese in origin, were certainly working in the same traditions of classical Newari metalwork that had been disseminated throughout the monasteries and shrines of the Himalayan region by traveling guilds of craftsmen, many of them Buddhist monks themselves.

A small, Yongle-era gilt-copper-alloy deity from a Vajrabhairava shrine was the top lot for Bonhams during its Asia Week auctions; it sold for $893,000, more than doubling its high estimate of $350,000. An image of the sun god Surya, it is believed to have been one of eight Hindu deities from the base of a monumental throne, an example of the religious syncretism characteristic of the Tibetan Buddhism patronized in the Yongle court.

The second half of the 20th century saw many Buddhist treasures transported out of Asia, to end up in museums and private collections in Europe and America. For many Chinese collectors, bringing these works of art back home is now a matter of national pride as well as spiritual merit. In October 2013 a large, Yongle-era gilt-bronze image of a seated Shakyamuni Buddha whipped up frenzied competition among big-spending Chinese collectors at Sotheby’s Hong Kong. Zheng Huaxing, the collector who eventually bought for it for $30.3 million—a world record for Chinese sculpture—theatrically bowed toward the cardinal points of the room before prostrating himself in prayer in front of the Buddha statue after the sale.

The wild spending shows no signs of abating. Last November at Christie’s Hong Kong, a magnificent silk thangka depicting the deity Rakta Yamari, which had changed hands for only $4 million in 2002, sold for $45 million. The buyer was Liu Yiqian, an investment tycoon and onetime taxi driver who, with his wife, Wang Wei, owns China’s largest private museum, in Shanghai, and has spent $115 million on art in the last year alone. Liu continued racking up the purchases in New York, spending nearly $19 million on two Buddhist works. One was a 39-leaf, gold-on-blue Ming Dynasty Buddhist sutra, estimated by Sotheby’s at $100,000 to $150,000, which triggered a bidding war that ramped the price up to $14 million, making it the week’s top lot. His other buy was a fabulous 11th- to 12th-century Tibetan bronze seated yogi that once stood on the headboard in Ellsworth’s bedroom, for which Liu paid $4.9 million. Ever the extrovert, the night before the auction Liu posted pictures of himself on social media dressed only in his underwear and seated in the same lotus position as the statue.

According to dealer Fabio Rossi of London- and Hong Kong–based Rossi & Rossi, Chinese taste is evolving fast as increasing numbers of new collectors become active in the market. “The Chinese are on a rapid learning curve,” he says. “Traditionally, Chinese buyers have been concerned with good condition and perfect gilding, but now we are seeing them becoming more aware of the subtleties of the field.”

“There are strong collecting communities in Taiwan and Hong Kong as well as mainland China,” adds Rossi. These buyers are served by an ever-growing number of dealers and agents as well as auction houses such as Hanhai in Beijing, which has its own dedicated Buddhist art department. In addition to China’s numerous private museums, Asian institutions actively collecting include the National Palace Museum in Taipei and the Singapore Asian Civilisations Museum.

At this year’s tefaf in Maastricht, one of the standout Himalayan pieces exhibited by Rossi & Rossi was an exceptionally large gilt and cast-copper image of a seated Vajra-dhara, a spectacular example of Nepalese repoussé work probably made in a Tibetan monastery in the 16th century—although the crown is likely 19th century—for which the dealers are asking around $2 million.

“Whereas Tibetan sculptures were locked up in monasteries and venerated as treasures, in Nepal worshippers always had direct contact with the images of their deities,” notes Edward Wilkinson, a Himalayan art specialist at Bonhams. “They would be rubbed, fed, anointed with liquids, painted, and sprinkled with colored powders.” The resulting imperfect condition of Nepalese bronzes has traditionally discouraged Chinese buyers, but has been one of the aspects most appreciated by collectors in the West.

“Nepalese bronzes are very rare, but for Chinese collectors, condition is still an issue,” says Rossi. “New Chinese collectors will generally look at Tibet first, but their taste and knowledge are evolving fast.”

The kind of pristine condition most in demand is exemplified by the top-priced sculpture in Sotheby’s Asia week sale of Himalayan, Indian, and Southeast Asian art: a fine Tibetan gilt-copper-alloy figure of Chakrasamvara
and his consort, Vajravarahi in ecstatic union (est. $400–600,000), which sold for $1,570,000.

There is clearly a danger that the deep-pocketed Chinese will monopolize the market. Chinese dealers or agents scrupulously monitor all levels of the trade. “If a Himalayan piece comes up in an auction in New Orleans, they will be there,” says Wilkinson. “Now we are even seeing them buying Indian Buddhist art such as Gandharan or Pala works.”

According to John Eskenazi, a London dealer with long experience selling Himalayan art, there are still collectors in Europe and America who are seriously focused on this field, many originally inspired by groundbreaking exhibitions
in the 1980s like those curated by Pratapaditya Pal at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. “The appeal of Nepalese art is that it is in favor of compassion,” Eskenazi says. “Not only is it very rare, but it has a very approachable quality compared with Tibetan art and has always been collected with great enthusiasm in the West.”

One of the most high-profile collections of Himalayan art to emerge in recent years has been that assembled by Shelley and Donald Rubin and displayed at the Rubin Museum, a former Barneys department store in Manhattan.

The more wealthy American museums are also prepared to make purchases, often acting with the help of donors. In 2012, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York bought a rare 11th-century Nepalese bronze of Vishnu riding on Garuda, while the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, in Richmond, has made a number of acquisitions including that of a spectacular 12th- to 13th-century Nepalese ritual crown, gilded and set with jewels.

The existence of a further potential market was also demonstrated last December when Pundole’s auction house in Mumbai sold Himalayan art from the collection of the late Roshan Sabavala, the widow of a Parsi industrialist who had acquired most of the 121 lots in Delhi in the 1950s and ’60s. The sale was a tremendous success, although, since many of the pieces were not exportable from India, prices never reached the stratospheric levels that Chinese interest has generated elsewhere. The top lot was a gilt-bronze image of Hevajra, made in Nepal in the 13th or 14th century, which sold for just over $400,000. International awareness and legislation over matters of stolen cultural heritage have been increasing in recent years, but the sale and collecting of antiquities from Nepal and Tibet have always retained a degree of controversy. Stolen and smuggled Asian antiquities have recently been the subject of a major federal investigation into the activities of New York art dealer Subhash Kapoor, who is currently in prison in Chennai, India. The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office released details last April of the largest seizure of antiquities in United States history, most from storage units belonging to Kapoor. The majority were Indian, but among the pieces confiscated were also a considerable number of bronze figures and ritual artifacts from Nepal and Tibet.

In recent years, efforts have increased among Nepali scholars and conservationists to trace the missing heritage of the Kathmandu Valley. Jürgen Schick, author of The Gods Are Leaving the Country: Art Theft from Nepal, 2006, estimates that 90 percent of the major pieces of Nepalese sculpture outside Nepal have been smuggled out of the country since the 1960s, when Nepal first opened its doors to Western tourism, becoming a favorite destination on the hippie trail and later for trekking and mountaineering. The whole of the Kathmandu Valley was declared a World Heritage Site as far back as 1979, but the great number of individual sites and shrines has made it almost impossible to defend from looters comprehensively.

Nepal’s porous borders and high level of corruption have further encouraged the flow of precious art out of the country. Of course, it may often be difficult if not impossible to determine when a particular work of art left the shrine it was made for and who legitimately owned it before it left the country.

Auction houses and dealers are all aware that it is more necessary than ever to research the provenance of anything they propose to sell. In reality this means ensuring that it will not later be revealed to have been stolen.

“We work hard to do our due diligence,” says Jain-Patel of Christie’s. “Two years ago we were informed that a set of 12th-century Nepalese painted wooden book covers had been stolen from the National Library in Kathmandu, and we immediately withdrew them from the auction and arranged for them to be returned.”

The Musée Guimet in Paris, too, has expressed a willingness to return stolen works, including an 11th-century figure of Uma-Maheshvara taken from Bhaktapur in 1984 and a 12th-century figure of Vishnu with Lakshmi and Garuda stolen from Patan in the late 1970s. The Nepali authorities have been criticized, however, for their lack of initiative in arranging the proper legal procedures for such repatriations. Whether the earthquake and its aftermath will prove an incentive or a distraction is difficult to tell.

How much the Buddhist art market will continue to flourish at its current level is also hard to predict. It may hinge on the Chinese economy, which, as of this writing, has been cooling. Any art market boom always carries with it the specter of a forthcoming crash, but in the case of Himalayan bronzes, the signs seem to indicate that the only way is up.