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Lot 53

 

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To M F Husain, coming from a heavily peopled land like India made the human figure impossible to ignore as a pictorial element. It features prominently in his oeuvre as “the vehicle for his exploration of the nature and drama of reality.” (Richard Bartholomew and Shiv S Kapur, Husain, New York: Harry N Abrams Inc, 1972, p. 36) Husain, who lost his mother Zainab at a very young age and had keenly felt the absence of a maternal presence... To M F Husain, coming from a heavily peopled land like India made the human figure impossible to ignore as a pictorial element. It features prominently in his oeuvre as “the vehicle for his exploration of the nature and drama of reality.” (Richard Bartholomew and Shiv S Kapur, Husain, New York: Harry N Abrams Inc, 1972, p. 36) Husain, who lost his mother Zainab at a very young age and had keenly felt the absence of a maternal presence since, and gravitated to the female form right from the early years of his practice. His early works often presented female rural workers where “even as the figures are shorn of all mystique, they are, at the same time, imbued with an aura that they bring from their rootedness to the earth.” According to art historian Yashodhara Dalmia, Husain’s women are “monumental in their fortitude and yet humble and ordinary in a duality that Husain expresses effortlessly in his early works.” (“A Metaphor for Modernity”, Yashodhara Dalmia, The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 101)

The present lot foregrounds figures of a group of women set against a nondescript green background. The women are seemingly rural, swathed in variously coloured shawls of red, white, black, and green as they hold a conversation. Two of the figures have their heads turned to one another but sport a wash of black in place of a face. The black-clad female figure in the centre is drawn in profile with a distinct nose while her face remains otherwise featureless. Dalmia contends that Husain’s obscured women have their genesis in the nature of feminine presence in Muslim private spaces from his formative years. She states, “Husain’s women are always enshrouded in an invisible veil, the simplicity of their form countered by their inaccessibility. They could well be women from his own childhood in a Muslim household, where the feminine presence alternates between the secretive and the visible.” (Dalmia, p. 111) He would go on to use this technique of obscuring the face in his series of paintings of Mother Teresa for a symbolic representation of her universal motherhood.

Husain uses thick, fluid black lines to define the figures, imparting them with solidity and a sense of dynamism. His lines owe much to a childhood spent learning the Kufic khat, an Arabic script used for the Quran. Art critic Shiv S Kapur, who makes an argument for the influence his exposure to calligraphy had on his early output, connects Husain’s affinity for Jain miniatures and Chinese art, and his calligraphic training to his arresting line work. “In Husain’s early work, however, the influence of calligraphy appears primarily in the suppleness of his lines. His preference for strong lines drew him to Jain miniature painting with its strong, even coarse, lines, and expressions of energy and movement in the stance of the figures. It also made him react sympathetically to the evocation of volume by calligraphic line in Chinese painting”. (Bartholomew and Kapur, p. 38)

Dalmia accords the vitality of his works to his lines. “Above all else, it was the line that was Husain’s strongest element and he used it with a bounding energy in his work. The deft strokes that came from an early acquaintance with calligraphy now encased the figure in simple, economic points of intersection.” In the artists’ own words, “Line is a virile force with keen latent mobility, which in spite of being imperceptible in nature, is constantly striving to assert itself.” (Dalmia, p. 109)

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