A little over a moth after her demise at the age of 91, costume designer and artist-painter Bhanu Athaiya’s little-known artworks fetched Rs. 88 lakh from a virtual auction yesterday (2nd December) evening. The artworks comprised the Oscar winning dress designer’s sketches and fashion illustrations before she became the celebrated Bhanu Athaiya. Her auctioned works, in a way, traced her journey from a modernist painter to a stylist who bagged the Academy Award for her costumes for Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi. The brochure for the auction spelt out the intent: “To bring to the fore alternate understandings of modernism in Indian art history through a spotlight on the works of Bhanu Athaiya”.
The two main paintings were ‘Prayer’ and ‘Lady In Repose’, which went for Rs. 43.75 lakh and Rs. 13.75 lakh respectively.