Indian artworks from German Gallerist's collection up for sale in London

Six decades before it became the muse of a cleanliness-seeking lawyer, Versova beach was the favoured haunt of a fenugreekseeking artist.

- Sharmila Ganesan

In the mid-1960s, perpetually-paint carrying, Europe-trained contemporary artist K K Hebbar would visit the beach often with his family to buy locally-grown fenugreek leaves. On one such occasion, even as fishermen were drying fish around him, a German woman saw the JJ School of Art protege quickly etch the mostly-blue-sky-and-yellow-sand landscape on the back of a Lalit Kala Akademi invitation card. This spontaneous drawing led to an untitled 1965 canvas which is now among over 80 prized Indian artworks belonging to German octogenarian Ute Rettberg, that are being sold at a Sotheby's London auction.

Spanning Madhubani to Neo-Tantric art, the exhibition--which is on until May 31--includes over-five-decades-old Indian drawings, printworks and sculptures amassed by Rettberg, who had come to Bombay in the mid-1960s as one of the first women in the German Consulate General and who--on leaving it in the 1970s--would become one of the first foreign gallerists to expand the international market for Indian art for nearly a decade.