Sadanand Bakre

Sadanand Bakre was born on 10 November 1920 in Baroda (present-day Vadodara), India. He had his early schooling in Baroda before his family moved to Bombay, where he attended the Gokhale Education Society's school on Grant Road and held his first solo exhibition there at age sixteen. In 1939 he enrolled in the Sculpture Department at Sir J. J. School of Art, Bombay, completing a five-year course in modelling and stone carving. He graduated in 1944 with a Diploma in Sculpture and the Lord Harding Scholarship. In 1945 he briefly joined the Civil Aviation Flying School of the Government of India and served as a pilot during the Second World War.

In 1947 Bakre co-founded the Progressive Artists' Group in Bombay with Husain, Souza, Raza, Ara, and Gade, a collective formed in the year of India's independence to move Indian art away from academic and nationalist conventions toward international modernism. He was the group's only trained sculptor. In 1949 his entry won the Silver Medal for best sculpture at the Bombay Art Society's annual exhibition. Around 1951 he relocated to London, where he spent more than two decades, exhibiting at venues including Gallery One and the Commonwealth Institute. Between 1969 and 1975 he held four solo exhibitions at the Nicholas Treadwell Gallery in London. He returned to India in 1975 and eventually settled in Murud-Harnai, on the Konkan coast in the Ratnagiri district of Maharashtra, where he continued to paint and sculpt. In 2004 the Bombay Art Society gave him a lifetime achievement award. Bakre suffered a heart attack on 18 December 2007 and died in Murud-Harnai, Maharashtra, on his way to hospital, according to the Ben Uri Research Unit and DAG.

Bakre is consistently framed in art-historical accounts as a founding member of the Bombay Progressive Artists' Group and its only sculptor, a distinction that separates him from the group's better-known painters. His inclusion in major surveys of the movement, including "The Progressive Revolution: Modern Art for a New India" at Asia Society Museum in New York (2018 to 2019) and "Indian Modernist Landscapes" at Grosvenor Gallery, London (2016), has reinforced his place in that history even as his individual market recognition has lagged behind Husain, Raza, and Souza. No verbatim critical assessment from a named critic in a major outlet could be confirmed for this profile with exact wording, so none is quoted here.

Bakre's auction market is thin relative to his Progressive Artists' Group peers, with a small number of tracked transactions spanning painting and sculpture. The best-documented all-time high is Monalisa, a 1961 figurative work, sold at AstaGuru's Historic Masterpieces sale for INR 2,30,73,603 and reported by The Tribune as a career auction record for the artist; the exact sale date has not been confirmed in available coverage. The next-highest documented result is an untitled 1950s bronze sculpture that sold for approximately INR 1.88 crore at Sotheby's Mumbai in November 2018, described at the time as a record for twentieth-century Indian sculpture.

There is no published catalogue raisonne for Bakre and no identified artist foundation or estate authentication body, so provenance research depends on auction house and gallery records rather than a centralized archive. His market includes both paintings and sculpture, categories that have produced different price benchmarks, and the number of public sales is small enough that any single result, including the current auction high, should be read with caution rather than as a stable trend line. Collectors should also be aware that his work circulates under slightly different name forms, Sadanand Bakre, Sadanand K. Bakre, and S. K. Bakre, all referring to the same artist.