Important Notice

The pairing of human and animal figures, their interactions and coexistence, is a subject that Husain returned to several times during his extensive career. Whether it is horse and rider, bull and peasant, elephant and dancer, or, in this case, tiger and woman, these juxtapositions of the familiar and the unfamiliar create a palpable tension that animates the artist’s painted surfaces.

“Husain’s metaphor is rich and of great... The pairing of human and animal figures, their interactions and coexistence, is a subject that Husain returned to several times during his extensive career. Whether it is horse and rider, bull and peasant, elephant and dancer, or, in this case, tiger and woman, these juxtapositions of the familiar and the unfamiliar create a palpable tension that animates the artist’s painted surfaces.

“Husain’s metaphor is rich and of great expressiveness. It brings a wide sweep to his way of looking at things, to his many approaches to reality. His symbols and represented objects are often startling in juxtaposition because they are drawn from such far reaches of artistic memory. Dark, intuitive, sometimes traditional symbols are cast within a contemporary design and given meanings that seem valid for this and every other time. And if the innocent in art is also the original, as indeed it is, then innocence is the other noteworthy feature of Husain’s work” (Shiv Kapur, Husain, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, 1961, p. i).

In the present lot, a woman rides a tiger, trampling a demon underfoot as the raging tiger charges forward in battle, capturing the nuanced relationship between strength and beauty, ferocity and delicate sensuality. Each form is bounded by the artist’s quick and confident line, which speaks of “…great sensitiveness and energy. It is a versatile line, capable of both power and poetry. It divides his forms in firm definition, broods amongst his grouped figures…It lurks in women’s faces in tender almost tentative hint, or threads sharply across his compositions like a scalpel, separating one figure, one face from the other in subtly differentiated tones of colour, as though he sculpted his figures from paint” (Ibid.).

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