Important Notice

“Art has to evolve from your very being, like my horses…I see them as ageless and immortal. They draw chariots in the great epics, they stand proudly in the poorest stables, they are embodiments of strength like the dragons of China” (M.F. Husain, Where Art Thou: An Autobiography with Khalid Mohammad, Mumbai, 2002, p. xxii).

One of the most powerful icons in Husain’s large body of work, the horse is a symbol of passion, strength,... “Art has to evolve from your very being, like my horses…I see them as ageless and immortal. They draw chariots in the great epics, they stand proudly in the poorest stables, they are embodiments of strength like the dragons of China” (M.F. Husain, Where Art Thou: An Autobiography with Khalid Mohammad, Mumbai, 2002, p. xxii).

One of the most powerful icons in Husain’s large body of work, the horse is a symbol of passion, strength, free-will and vitality. The artist’s multiple encounters with the equestrian figure began as early as his childhood days in Indore, spent in the company of his grandfather’s friend Achan Mian the farrier, and extended to his visits to China and Europe in the 1950s and ‘60s, where he came across the traditional work of artists like Xu Beihong and the contemporary works of Franz Marc and Marino Marini.

“The horse as a multidimensional symbolic motif was itself to interest Husain deeply. During his travels in China in 1952 he studied the Sung dynasty renderings of horses. Later, in Europe, where as he found the Renaissance horses unexciting, he was strongly attracted by Franz Marc’s work and Marino Marini’s archaic equestrian sculpture, with its balance between horizontal and vertical lines to achieve a feeling of solitary and monumental anguish. Husain’s own use of the horse motif has been, however more intuitive and complex…[Husain’s horses] are subterranean creatures. Their nature is not intellectualized; it is rendered as a sensation or as abstract movement, with a capacity to stir up vague premonitions and passions in a mixture of ritualistic fear and exultant anguish” (Richard Bartholomew and Shiv Kapur, Husain, Harry N. Abrams Inc., New York, 1972, p. 39, 40).

In the present lot, the four fierce horses resonate with multiple meanings. Born of Husain’s strong line and thick brushwork, these beasts buck and paw at the ground, their impatience to lead the future in evident in each twitching sinew. At one with their female rider, these animals are rendered as portents of great change, endowed with the powers they are accorded in Hindu mythology as symbols of the sun, knowledge and fertility.

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