Important Notice

"Art has to evolve from your very being, like my horses…I see them as ageless and immortal. They draw chariots in the great epics, they stand proudly in the poorest stables, they are embodiments of strength like the dragons of China" (M.F. Husain, Where Art Thou: An Autobiography with Khalid Mohammad, Mumbai, 2002, p. xxii).

One of the most powerful icons in Husain's expansive body of work, the horse is a symbol of passion,... "Art has to evolve from your very being, like my horses…I see them as ageless and immortal. They draw chariots in the great epics, they stand proudly in the poorest stables, they are embodiments of strength like the dragons of China" (M.F. Husain, Where Art Thou: An Autobiography with Khalid Mohammad, Mumbai, 2002, p. xxii).

One of the most powerful icons in Husain's expansive body of work, the horse is a symbol of passion, strength, free-will and vitality. The artist's multiple encounters with the equestrian figure began as early as his childhood days in Indore, spent in the company of his grandfather's friend Achan Mian the farrier. Husain also encountered the figure of the horse in the religious stories he was told as a child. It featured in the tales of the Battle of Karbala and Imam Husain the martyr that he heard from his elders at home, as well as those of Ashwamedh, the heroic riderless horse of Hindu epics, that he learnt about at his school.

The artist's fascination with the animal was further developed during his travels in China and Italy in the 1950s. "The horse as a multidimensional symbolic motif was itself to interest Husain deeply. During his travels in China in 1952 he studied the Sung dynasty renderings of horses. Later, in Europe, where as he found the Renaissance horses unexciting, he was strongly attracted by Franz Marc's work and Marino Marini's archaic equestrian sculpture, with its balance between horizontal and vertical lines to achieve a feeling of solitary and monumental anguish" (Richard Bartholomew and Shiv Kapur, Husain, Harry N. Abrams Inc., New York, 1972, p. 39). As Yashodhara Dalmia notes, along with the artist, his horse "…swept across continents, amalgamating various influences into a composite form" yet always remained unique and "...singularly his own" (The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2001, p. 107).

The present lot, a powerful, monochromatic rendering of three horses, is influenced both by Marini's equestrian structures, constructed out of effortless verticals and horizontals, and by the economy of line and colour of Chinese ink drawings. Prancing and rearing, with broad chests and flaring nostrils, these horses are a symbol of bounding passion, power and virility. As in his other equine portraits, here the horses "…are rampant or galloping; the manes, the fury, the working buttocks, the prancing legs, and the strong neighing heads with dilated nostrils are blocks of color which are vivid or tactile or are propelled in their significant progression by strokes of the brush or sweeps of the palette knife. The activity depicted has been transformed into the action of paint…[They] are subterranean creatures. Their nature is not intellectualized; it is rendered as sensation or as abstract movement, with a capacity to stir up vague premonitions and passions in a mixture of ritualistic fear and exultant anguish" (Richard Bartholomew and Shiv Kapur, Husain, Harry N. Abrams Inc., New York, 1972, p. 20, 43).

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