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Lot 27

 

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"So animated, so brisk was her walk... I sat there aghast... looking at her, at her frail body bend at the back. She was in a coarse white cotton sari, worn in the Bengali style. Her face, her wrinkled skin was illuminated by an inner light." - M F HUSAIN

M F Husain's depiction of Mother Teresa as a faceless figure is more representational than realistic. In his work, she becomes a vehicle for conveying compassion, caring, and... "So animated, so brisk was her walk... I sat there aghast... looking at her, at her frail body bend at the back. She was in a coarse white cotton sari, worn in the Bengali style. Her face, her wrinkled skin was illuminated by an inner light." - M F HUSAIN

M F Husain's depiction of Mother Teresa as a faceless figure is more representational than realistic. In his work, she becomes a vehicle for conveying compassion, caring, and motherly love. According to critics, Husain's preoccupation with Mother Teresa may have been rooted in the loss of his own mother during infancy and his yearning for a maternal figure -- which seems especially poignant in the present lot. She is identifiable by her iconic white saree with a blue border, and "perhaps the manifold yards of cloth could hold the lost and yearning child in Husain forever." (Yashodhara Dalmia, "A Metaphor for Modernity," The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 116)

Husain began painting Mother Teresa after an impactful meeting with her, more than a decade before this painting was made. In 1980, the artist created a series of works featuring her as the protagonist, exhibited three years later at the fashion house Pierre Cardin in Paris. Since then, he revisited Mother Teresa as the subject of his paintings several times. "I have tried to capture in my paintings what her presence meant to the destitute and the dying, the light and hope she brought by mere inquiry, by putting her hand over a child abandoned in a street. I did not cry at this encounter. I returned with so much strength and sadness that it continues to ferment within. That is why I try it again and again, after a gap of time, in a different medium. To translate that pain in my paintings, I think I will have to die of it." (Artist quoted in Ila Pal, Beyond the Canvas: An Unfinished Portrait of M F Husain, New Delhi: Indus, 1994, p. 166)

The artist also travelled to Italy to study pre-Renaissance paintings of saints and apostles to further his understanding and technique. He learned how to capture the folds of their robes, which, according to him, "seemed capable of covering, canopying and sheltering... In Mother Teresa he found the universal mother, not as a face, but a presence where one could repose without guilt, become small, and lose oneself in her spacious lap..." (Pal, p. 166)

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