Mumbai, September 22: It’s a celebration the Indian art community has been awaiting since long. Just a day after Ram Kumar’s untitled work of 1970 got sold for Rs 1.74 crore at Sotheby’s, 80-year-old Tyeb Mehta’s Mahisasura set a new record for Indian art at Christie’s New York auction on Wednesday. An NRI in the US paid a spectacular Rs 6.96 crore ($1,584,000) for the painting.

While 80-year-old Mehta was the first Indian artist to break the $100,000 threshold, this is also the artist’s second price record at a public auction. Christie’s auction of Indian and Southeast Asian Art—modern and contemporary—was held a day after Sotheby’s big auction in the same city. But Christie’s has more than one reason to cheer. Of the total 117 works, 106 got sold. Ram Kumar scored a perfect triple crore of rupees in the last two days as two of his works—one from the Benares series and another of a Ladakh landscape—fetched Rs 1.69 crore and Rs 1.15 crore at Christie’s, a notch lower than his Rs 1.74 crore Sotheby’s record.

While Sotheby’s Indian art show was valued at Rs 30 crore, Christie’s saw a total value of Rs 49.6 crore. Of the entire lot, at least seven works have crossed the

Rs 1 crore magic number. Apart from Mahisasura and the two Ram Kumar paintings, M F Husain’s Trial (1969)—depicting a women’s panchayat in session—fetched Rs 2.14 crore.

Two works of Francis Newton Souza, Girl with Hairpin and Girdle, and an untitled work depicting a cityscape (1961) got sold for Rs 1.25 crore and Rs 1.15 crore respectively. A recent work of Akbar Padamsee, Mirror Image, went for Rs 1.84 crore.

At least three other works of Husain got sold for above $100,000: Horse (Rs 63 lakh), Man in Space (Rs 73 lakh) and an untitled work (Rs 58 lakh). Husain, who always makes a significant presence at Christie’s auctions, had at least 16 of his works go under the hammer.

Works of Anju Dodiya (Doubt, Rs 18 lakh) and Atul Dodiya (My School in Angkor, Rs 71 lakh), which the artists created during an art camp in Cambodia this year, have set new price benchmarks that went beyond expectation. At Sotheby’s, another painting of Atul Dodiya, The Mocking, got snapped up for Rs 63.3 lakh.

Other artists whose works got sold include Manjit Bawa (Rs 63 lakh) and Syed Haider Raza (Jagriti, Rs 70 lakh; Kundalini, Rs 63 lakh).