Important Notice

Lot 73

 

Quick Zoom

Throughout his career, M.F. Husain has strived to link the language of modern art with the beliefs, traditions and classical arts of India’s past. Through his paintings, the artist re-contextualizes and contemporizes the country’s ancient tropes and customs, layering them with additional, and often personal, meaning. The present lot, part of a series of paintings that Husain executed in the 1970s titled ‘Maya’, literally translating as illusion,... Throughout his career, M.F. Husain has strived to link the language of modern art with the beliefs, traditions and classical arts of India’s past. Through his paintings, the artist re-contextualizes and contemporizes the country’s ancient tropes and customs, layering them with additional, and often personal, meaning. The present lot, part of a series of paintings that Husain executed in the 1970s titled ‘Maya’, literally translating as illusion, refers to the Hindu philosophical concept that the world we inhabit and all of its material goods and wealth are illusory, distracting and preventing us from encountering the Truth. Bound to the phenomenal universe by our egos and actions, we must recognise and escape maya in order to achieve moksha or enlightenment.

In this vivid Expressionist canvas, Husain chooses to embody this philosophical concept through the figure of a kneeling woman, etched out of the red and blue background with his confident yet poetic line. As Maya is a common Indian name for girls and frequently used to refer to various women in Hindu and Buddhist mythology, this pairing of concept and expression seems natural.

The female figure has persisted as one of the leitmotifs in Husain’s body of work since his earliest experiments with paint. Reflecting his upbringing and early experience of loss, these figures, like the one in the present lot, are frequently faceless, as if “…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. The suppressed yearning could be for his mother, who died when he was only two years old, leaving him feeling permanently bereft” (Yashodhara Dalmia, The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2001, p. 111).

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