Important Notice

Lot 73

 

Quick Zoom

Beauty and the female form have long fascinated M.F. Husain, particularly the way in which they are approached and linked within various local Indian cultural and aesthetic traditions. Husain's interpretations of this rich and unique engagement with figuration in India straddle the boundary between the realistic and the idealistic. From the early formal, structural studies of rural women that the artist executed in the late 1940s and 1950s, to... Beauty and the female form have long fascinated M.F. Husain, particularly the way in which they are approached and linked within various local Indian cultural and aesthetic traditions. Husain's interpretations of this rich and unique engagement with figuration in India straddle the boundary between the realistic and the idealistic. From the early formal, structural studies of rural women that the artist executed in the late 1940s and 1950s, to the more abstract, faceless and sensuous female bodies that he began to paint in the 1970s, Husain's reverence for women is more than apparent in his extensive oeuvre.

Husain's works featuring the female form also "…indicate a female body type that Husain was steadily evolving since his encounter with Gupta sculptures [in Delhi] in 1948 and Chola sculptures in Madras Museum in the 1950's. he had also studied the famous erotic sculptures of Khajuraho in which the female figures are far more voluptuous and generously endowed than in Gupta sculptures. Husain comes from a conservative middle class background with deep religious convictions. He was aware that in the Hindu classical sculptures, there is a synthesis between the erotic and the spiritual. However, his own background did not prepare him to completely accept the uninhibited display of mithuna or the act of love making depicted in Khajuraho sculptures. As Geeta Kapur, the renowned art scholar points out, ‘Husain's shyness worked to his advantage. He drew-in the baroque contours of the figures and gave them a taut, tense quality which in turn became his basic mode of delineating the figure'" (K. Bikram Singh, Maqbool Fida Husain, Rahul & Art, New Delhi, 2008, p. 111, 112).

In the present lot, Husain presents a regal lady in repose, waited on by a handmaiden almost invisible against the background. Both women's postures are typically Indian, speaking volumes about social mores and traditions, as well as the importance the artist saw in breaking away from academic realism to reflect the reality of India. The palette that the artist has used here, especially in portraying the protagonist's body, references the Indian tradition of bathing and massaging a bride-to-be in a fragrant paste of yellow turmeric and sandalwood – an age-old, purifying beauty ritual associated with pre-marriage celebrations.

Read More
Artist Profile
Other works of this artist in: this auction  |  entire site