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Lot 26

 

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Between 1948 and the mid 1950s, M.F. Husain and his fellow members of the Bombay based Progressive Artists' Group endeavoured both to develop unique, modern artistic vocabularies for themselves, and to forge a new aesthetic identity for India. Speaking about these early years, M.F. Husain explains, "We came out to fight against two prevalent schools of thought in those days, the Royal Academy, which was British-oriented, and the revivalist... Between 1948 and the mid 1950s, M.F. Husain and his fellow members of the Bombay based Progressive Artists' Group endeavoured both to develop unique, modern artistic vocabularies for themselves, and to forge a new aesthetic identity for India. Speaking about these early years, M.F. Husain explains, "We came out to fight against two prevalent schools of thought in those days, the Royal Academy, which was British-oriented, and the revivalist school in Mumbai, which was not a progressive movement…The movement to get rid of these influences and to evolve a language that is rooted in our own culture was a great movement, and one that historians have not taken note of. It was important because any great change in a nation's civilisation begins in the field of culture. Culture is always ahead of other political and social movements… Our concern was to evolve not only art as a profession to make a living, but to do serious research to evolve a language for Indian contemporary art. It had to be rooted in our culture and all the points of reference had to be ours, but it had to use modern techniques as well. There was no point in painting like Indian miniatures, or like Ajanta and Ellora" ("An Artist and a Movement", Frontline Magazine, Vol. 14, No. 16, August 1997).

Thus, although Husain used various modern Western techniques in his paintings, he also drew heavily on traditional Indian art forms, particularly dance and sculpture. The classical tribhanga or tri-axial posture of the women he painted is perhaps the most conspicuous link to ancient Indian sculpture in the artist's body of work. In an interview with Pritish Nandy, Husain explains, "…in the East the human form is an entirely different structure…the way a woman walks in the village there are three breaks…from the feet, the hips and the shoulder…they move in rhythm, the walk of a European is erect and archaic" (as quoted in The Illustrated Weekly of India, December 1983).

The present lot underlines the confluence of the avant-garde and the historic, the Western and the Eastern, in the modern idiom and style that Husain came to be identified with from the late 1940s. Here, the artist paints a group of bathing women or gopis surrounded by foliage, reminiscent both of classical Indian sculptural forms and the work of several European modernists with whom bathers were a popular subject. To the right of the women, a shadowy, bearded sage holds a small child aloft, accentuating the significance of its birth and making a prophecy about its future. The child's blue body, surrounded by a protective corona, possibly represents Lord Krishna, said to be the eighth of Vishnu's ten avatars, and the narrator of the holy book, the Bhagavad Gita.

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