Important Notice

Born in 1915, M.F. Husain was a founding member of the Progressive Artists’ Group and remains one of the best known and most prolific Indian modernists today. A self-taught artist for the most part, Husain began his career in the arts as a billboard painter and toy designer. Since his first exhibition of paintings with the Progressives in 1947, however, Husain’s modern artistic vocabulary has accommodated almost all of the trends and traditions... Born in 1915, M.F. Husain was a founding member of the Progressive Artists’ Group and remains one of the best known and most prolific Indian modernists today. A self-taught artist for the most part, Husain began his career in the arts as a billboard painter and toy designer. Since his first exhibition of paintings with the Progressives in 1947, however, Husain’s modern artistic vocabulary has accommodated almost all of the trends and traditions that have marked the development of modern Indian art.

Husain’s extensive oeuvre draws inspiration from global urban culture as well as several different Indian historical and traditional sources. From the classical aesthetics of Gupta and Chola sculpture, the artist learnt to communicate the movement of dance, the rhythm of music, and the sensuousness of the human form. From the Basholi miniature tradition, Husain developed his vivid palette and understood the varied ways in which the painted surface could be structured. Finally, he imbibed the rough innocence of India’s varied folk art traditions. It was in the convergence of all these elements, that the artist’s unique modern Indian idiom was born.

Dance and music are inspirational for Husain, and amongst the most frequent of his subjects. In the words of critic Roshan Shahani, the artist “…has tuned himself into the disciplines of several arts. The vibrations of dance, music and Urdu poetry are caught in a jagged thrust of lines and colors. He can draw and paint with complete surrender to the sound and graphic representations of these modes. Musical rhythm or pure sound finds its way easily into the schemes of the paintings” (Let History Cut Across Me without Me, Vadehra Art Gallery exhibition catalogue, 1993, p. 1).

In the present lot, Husain accesses Kerala’s deep-rooted traditions of dance in a depiction of a masked and painted danseur and his consort in the shade of a banana tree. This verdant Southern Indian state, which later became the subject of an entire series of canvases Husain painted in the 1990s, is known for its beauty and culture. Here, Husain’s interpretation of Kathakali (literally, ‘story-play’), a dance-drama native to Kerala, emphasizes the stunning masks and elaborate costumes that the practitioners of this art form don to enact traditional stories.

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