?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 800 - $ 1,200
V.V. SHETYE (DATES UNKNOWN)
INDIA / AIR - INDIA. 1964.
39 3/4x25 1/4 inches, 101x64 1/4 cm. Prasad Process Private, Ltd., Madras. Condition A-: expert overpainting in margins and lower image.
A world-renowned and widely recognized corporate icon, Air India's Maharaja was born in 1946. His likeness was intended to be used on corporate letterhead and on an in-flight memo pad. "Eventually, [he] became Air-India's mascot for its advertising and sales promotion activities . . . The Maharaja began merely as a rich Indian potentate, symbolizing graciousness and high living. And somewhere along the line his creators gave him a distinctive personality, his outsized moustache, the striped turban and his aquiline nose . . . Air-India calls him the Maharaja for want of a better description. But his blood isn't blue. He may look like royalty, but he isn't royal . . . Today, this naughty, diminutive Maharaja of Air-India has become a world figure. He can be a lover boy in Paris, a sumo wrestler in Tokyo, a pavement artist, a Red Indian, a monk. He can effortlessly flirt with the beauties of the world . . . He has become the most recognizable mascot the world over" (The Chandigarh Tribune, July 17, 2005). "In this poster, the Maharaja's stint as a street performer outraged many who believed that the depiction of India as a "land of snake charmers'' was both outdated and offensive" (Poster House, Air India's Maharaja, Sept. 9 - Feb. 12, 2023).
