Important Notice

“Line is a virile force with keen latent mobility, which in spite of being imperceptible in nature, is constantly striving to assert itself.”? M F HUSAIN

Over the course of his life, M F Husain lived in many places like India, London and the Middle East. He travelled the world extensively, picking up a range of eclectic influences along the way. His body of work drew from several civilisations across the globe while... “Line is a virile force with keen latent mobility, which in spite of being imperceptible in nature, is constantly striving to assert itself.”? M F HUSAIN

Over the course of his life, M F Husain lived in many places like India, London and the Middle East. He travelled the world extensively, picking up a range of eclectic influences along the way. His body of work drew from several civilisations across the globe while remaining rooted in his native India; they came together to create works that reflected his complex sense of belonging. Reflecting on Husain’s ability to seamlessly straddle traditions, critic Ranjit Hoskote says, “...it is not surprising that he was, in effect, a transregional and transcultural artist, operating with multiple frameworks of belonging. India would always be his beloved homeland and a magnificent source of inspiration; yet he also saw himself as a part of the circulations of international modernism and as a member of the global Muslim ecumene embracing topographies as far apart as West Africa and West Asia, Spain and Indonesia, the Mediterranean and Central Asia.” (Ranjit Hoskote. “M. F. Husain: Life, Legend and Afterlife”, Ranjit Hoskote, Bruce B Lawrence, Shuddhabrata Sengupta et al, M. F. Husain: Horses of the Sun, Qatar: Mahtaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, 2020, p. 26)

Towards the end of his life, Husain made a series of paintings inspired by the Arab civilisation. In some of the works, the artist rendered the past and present of Yemen, a country from where his Suleimani Bohra ancestors embarked to settle in India centuries ago. It held a special place in his heart because of this ancestral connection and he incorporated text eulogising the great nation in his 2008 work Warriors and Poets. “Yemen is that of a silence in which the echoes of time past and early beginnings of the future/ The new world has not replaced the old Yemen of poets and warriors.” (Ranjit Hoskote, Bruce B Lawrence, Shuddhabrata Sengupta et al, M. F. Husain: Horses of the Sun, Qatar: Mahtaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, 2020, p. 82) Although untitled, Husain includes many motifs from his Yemen works in the present lot, like men dressed in traditional attire of the Arabian Peninsula, camels, palm trees and minarets.

Husain eschews the established rules of realism in rendering the forms. While this distortion could be attributed partly to his early encounter with Expressionism, it is equally indebted to the figuration of Indian miniatures. Art critic Shiv S Kapur expounds on the Indian lineage of Husain’s distorted figuration with, “We must remember that emotive distortion was nothing new to the Indian artist. His effort had always been to render the quintessential form, that which represented the intrinsic nature of the object as perceived by him. In the classical sculpture and later in the miniature painting, form was perceived as an ideogram, the bearer of a familiar idea or emotion renewed and recharged with meaning in the process of re?creation. Actuality was viewed as no more than the manifest dimension of reality: other dimensions lay hidden behind it, and the natural form in art only hinted at their presence.” (Richard Bartholomew and Shiv S Kapur, Husain, New York: Harry N Abrams, 1972, p. 36)

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