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Lot 51

 

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"The eighth decade, the decade of eternal mother,
Her white sari, lights up the unlit lanes of Calcutta.
I paint and unfold several layers of her sari,
In search of my lost mother.
Sometimes her trembling hand,
Appears from the bodyless bundle of cloth
To touch her fugitive son."
-Maqbool Fida Husain (K. Bikram Singh, Husain, Rahul & Art, New Delhi, 2008, pg. 229)

M.F. Husain first met Mother... "The eighth decade, the decade of eternal mother,
Her white sari, lights up the unlit lanes of Calcutta.
I paint and unfold several layers of her sari,
In search of my lost mother.
Sometimes her trembling hand,
Appears from the bodyless bundle of cloth
To touch her fugitive son."
-Maqbool Fida Husain (K. Bikram Singh, Husain, Rahul & Art, New Delhi, 2008, pg. 229)

M.F. Husain first met Mother Teresa at Palam Airport, New Delhi, in 1979, and he was overwhelmed by emotion. "He could not find words to express his feelings in her magnanimous presence. Anything would appear weak" (Rashda Siddiqui, In Conversation with Husain Paintings, Books Today, New Delhi, 2001, pg. 200). He quickly sketched her face on a piece of paper, pushed through the throng of people gathered to catch a glimpse of her, and simply thrust it in her hands. "She saw it and wrote 'God bless you' on the sketch and signed" (Ibid. pg. 200).

The saintly Mother had a great impact on him, and depicting her in his art became an obsession of his. Husain spent his next summer studying paintings of saints in Florence, and brought the knowledge he gleaned there to his pictorial representations of Mother Teresa. His earlier works were realistic in form, but with each successive work Husain had turned the Mother's image into a symbolic metaphor: she was embedded in the white folds of her thick, cotton sari given reverence by its broad, blue border. Husain rarely depicted faces in his figurative works; with the Mother, he went a step further and painted the entirety of her presence in obscure, inky darkness within the elegant folds of her robe. Surrounding this all-encompassing darkness- an abstract space of universality and compassion-Husain then incorporated "images of emaciated children and dying men and women who were the prime objects of Mother Teresa's boundless love" (K. Bikram Singh, Husain, Rahul & Art, New Delhi, 2008, pg. 231). The motif of naked or semi-naked children, their limbs contorted in playful motions, is a recurring one throughout Husain's body of work.

Husain's veneration for Mother Teresa stemmed from his own quest for maternal love, a kinship he was deprived of at a very young age when his own mother passed away. "Husain saw in her the artist's concept of motherhood hallowed both in Indian and western art...the spiritual dimension of Mother Teresa was as important to him as an artist, as her more obvious manifestation of motherhood" (Ibid. pg. 229). Through the image of Mother Teresa, an emblem of salvation and humanitarianism, Husain was perhaps suggesting that suffering and motherly love are universal.

For Husain, the agonies in life were synonymous with the celebration of it, and he expressed this in many of his artworks. His inspiration had many sources: from a childhood spent in Pandharpur and Indore, where he encountered religious ethnography and cultures of classical music, to his early years as a craftsman designing toys and painting billboards and kitsch film posters. In the 1940s, he was one of the founding members of the Bombay Progressives, a group of eminent artists who brought forth the Modernist era for art in India. In the changing political and historical landscape of a newly independent India, these artists strove to find a unique identity for Indian art. "Husain's aim has been to find a voice, reclaimed from his Indian roots, with which to respond to a modernizing Indian in which cubism and multi-national corporations co-exist with ancient epics and non-modernizing villages" (Daniel Herwitz, Husain, Tata Press Bombay, Mumbai, 1988, pg. 17).

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