Important Notice

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 practices 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... 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 practices 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 soon after, Husain`s reverence for the woman 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 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, the artist paints a woman’s profile alongside a hooded cobra or naga, a snake that has several associations with ancient Indian myth and folk lore. In this painting, however, Husain is perhaps alluding to the festival of Nag Panchami, celebrated variously across the South Asian subcontinent. Traditionally, on this day, married women pray to the snake gods to seek their good will for the wellbeing of their families. Executed in a combination of thick impasto and flatly applied paint, this canvas underscores the artist’s deep understanding of Indian history and traditions, and his commitment to their chronicling.

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