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Lot 103

 

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“For me painting is the sheer joy of colour and lines.”
- M F HUSAIN

The present lot was made in the year of M F Husain’s 88th birthday, which he marked by undertaking a major project to produce 88 works. These paintings were made with oil-marking the first time in nearly three decades that the artist used the medium in a major work-at art galleries and ateliers in Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, and Paris, with this canvas forming a... “For me painting is the sheer joy of colour and lines.”
- M F HUSAIN

The present lot was made in the year of M F Husain’s 88th birthday, which he marked by undertaking a major project to produce 88 works. These paintings were made with oil-marking the first time in nearly three decades that the artist used the medium in a major work-at art galleries and ateliers in Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, and Paris, with this canvas forming a part of his Paris Suite. The prodigious scale of the output is testament to the artist’s famously spontaneous creative process. He said of his practice, “Like it didn’t take half a century to write Wasteland, it doesn’t take an entire lifetime to create a body of paintings… If you become overly conscious about what you are doing, then artificiality, a fake-ness creeps in.” (Artist quoted in 88 Husains in Oils 003, Kolkata: Galerie 88, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery and Mumbai: Pundole Art Gallery, 2003)

Oils were a luxury for Husain as a child: he was encouraged to take up affordable watercolours because of his family’s limited means. Husain sold his textbooks to purchase oils to use in secret. His hard-earned proficiency in the medium led to several masterpieces early in his career. Husain’s love for oil painting came from the depth it allowed for in his work. “Oils have never been a traditional medium of art in our country. Frescoes were done in tempera. It has to be admitted that oil is a western medium and its great advantage is that it has a body. Other mediums just don’t have the same thickness, the same depth of layering. A layer over a red base will be seen. Oils also by their very nature don’t compel you to fill up blank spaces. The ecstasy is in structuring the space with colour, almost as if you were sculpting space. Or as Andrei Tarkovsky put it, the way you sculpt time in cinema.” (Artist quoted in 88 Husains in Oils 003)

Husain approached the project intuitively. Although he was influenced by Dutch Renaissance painting at the time, he worked fluidly so that the spirit of the Renaissance was expressed through his own style. Each work functions as an independent image articulating the artist’s vision. New subjects join familiar imagery like the horse and Husain’s archetypal women. The present lot foregrounds the black angel-one of the new characters introduced by Husain at this time-in conversation with an old man. Husain asserted the non-narrative tenor of the series in explaining his intention for these works. “There isn’t a presiding theme per se, like there aren’t any canvases which are based on stories from our great epics. I’m merely trying to collate my experience of 60 years through the paintings. Through men, women, plants, animals and birds.” (Artist quoted in 88 Husains in Oils 003)

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