A long lunch is ending on a short autumn day, as late sun streaks the dining room of London’s Chelsea Arts Club, where two monuments of Indian art are catching up on a decade spent apart. Syed Haider Raza, 88, and Maqbool Fida Husain, 94, go back 60 years to 1940s Bombay, where they pioneered modern painting in India. Their most recent works are hanging together again, first at a preview at Art London and then at a major exhibition in December, and the occasion is worthy of a reunion. The conversation inevitably travels back to their salad days—who is dead and who is still alive, who is working and who isn’t and who are the young artists they are watching. Today the works of Raza and Husain routinely hammer six-digit sums and hang in collections around the world. Traditionally, it’s been the Indian diaspora who has collected Indian modernists, but increasingly their works are being snapped up by Western, Japanese and Middle Eastern collectors. READ MORE