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Lot 39

 

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Following India’s independence, Husain and several of his contemporaries travelled the country to explore its rich and varied heritage of painting, sculpture, music, theatre and dance. Recalling one such trip made with Souza to the India Independence Exhibition at Rashtrapati Bhavan, New Delhi, Husain says, “We went to Delhi together to see that big exhibition of Indian sculpture and miniatures which was shown in 1948…It was humbling. I cambe... Following India’s independence, Husain and several of his contemporaries travelled the country to explore its rich and varied heritage of painting, sculpture, music, theatre and dance. Recalling one such trip made with Souza to the India Independence Exhibition at Rashtrapati Bhavan, New Delhi, Husain says, “We went to Delhi together to see that big exhibition of Indian sculpture and miniatures which was shown in 1948…It was humbling. I cambe back to Bombay and in 1948 I came out with five paintings, which was the turning point in my life. I deliberately picked up two or three periods of Indian history. One was the classical period of the Guptas. The very sensuous form of the femal body. Next, was the Basholi period. The strong colours of the Basholi miniatures. The last was the folk element. With these three combined, and using colours very boldly as I did with cinema hoardings…I went to town…That was the breaking point…To come out of the influence of British academic painting and the Bengal revivalist school” (as quoted in an interview with Pritish Nandy, The Illustrated Weekly of India, 1983).

Since the early 1950s, then, Husain’s unique modern vocabulary has always acknowledged traditional Indian sensibilities, and, on several occasions, used classical Indian aesthetics as a substrate on which his images could be constructed. “Behind every stroke of the artist’s brush is a vast hinterland of traditional concepts, forms and meanings. His vision is never uniquely his own; it is a new perspective given to the collective experience of his race. It is in this fundamental sense that we speak of Husain being in the authentic tradition of Indian art. He has been unique in his ability to forge a pictorial language which is indisputably of the contemporary Indian situation but surcharged with all the energies, the rhythms of his art heritage” (E. Alkazi, M.F. Husain: The Modern Artist and Tradition, Art Heritage exhibition catalogue, p. 3).

The present lot highlights the early development of Husain’s unique idiom and his debt to Gupta sculptures and Basholi miniatures in its unusual colour scheme and its four human forms that seem to almost merge into the landscape behind them. Rather than be understood as a single, comprehensive image, this painting, like many of Husain’s early canvases, should be read as part of the artist’s larger exploration of colour, form and narrative that extended each of his works beyond its frame. “Husain views each painting as a fragment of music whose counterpoint exists elsewhere, and his entire painterly activity as one immense effort at orchestration of all the notes that he hears struck upon his personality. No painting is intended as a complete statement. In a continuing enquiry into the nature of being, every one of his wide array of works, joyous or grave, leaves the viewer with an intimation of other possibilities” (Richard Bartholomew and Shiv Kapur, Husain, Harry N. Abrams Inc., New York, 1972, p. 60).

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