Auction introduction: This season, Christie’s live auction of South Asian Modern + Contemporary Art will be held on 19 March during Asian Art Week in New York. The sale celebrates the evolution and diversity of the arts of South Asia and its diaspora by showcasing seminal works by the most iconic South Asian artists practicing in the 20th and 21st centuries. The live auction is complemented by our South Asian Modern + Contemporary Art Online auction, running from 12 to 25 March. The auction is led by an exceptional group of early works by members of the Progressive Artists’ Group and their associates, which are completely fresh to the market. This selection includes a seminal formative painting by Maqbool Fida Husain from 1954, unexhibited since it was purchased in the year it was painted, Sayed Haider Raza’s iconic 1953 gouache, Black Sun, from the esteemed collection of Madame and Monsieur Jacques Lassaigne, and Akbar Padamsee’s monumental Untitled, a significant landscape from 1969 acquired more than 50 years ago by the pioneering collectors Bilwa and Lore Chowdhury. The catalogue also features other significant early paintings by Raza and Husain, and important works by Francis Newton Souza, Krishnaji Howlaji Ara, Krishen Khanna, Zainul Abedin, Gulam Rasool Santosh, Zarina and Sudhir Patwardhan. Accompanying these masterpieces is a group of works by the forerunners of modernism in South Asia, including Jamini Roy, Walter Langhammer and George Keyt and the itinerant American artist Edwin Lord Weeks. Another important group of works in the catalogue celebrates the legacy of the Baroda Group of artists and the Faculty of Fine Arts at Maharaja Sayajirao University. Coming from various collections including that of the visionary architect B.V. Doshi and his family, this section of the sale comprises paintings, works on paper, prints and sculptures by artists like Bhupen Khakhar, K.G. Subramanyan, Jeram Patel, Sankho Chowdhury and Gulammohammed Sheikh.