M F Husain’s oeuvre is dotted with recurring motifs which show up throughout his career. He imbibed inspiration from a variety of influences like history, mythology, Western modern art, and classical Indian sculpture to produce a unique resonant visual language. The present lot from 1992 brings together several of Husain’s recurring motifs in a work of charged monumentality.

Flanking the assemblage on the left, the horse is one of... M F Husain’s oeuvre is dotted with recurring motifs which show up throughout his career. He imbibed inspiration from a variety of influences like history, mythology, Western modern art, and classical Indian sculpture to produce a unique resonant visual language. The present lot from 1992 brings together several of Husain’s recurring motifs in a work of charged monumentality.

Flanking the assemblage on the left, the horse is one of Husain’s most iconic motifs. Its regal grandeur was impressed upon him young on seeing effigies of Duldul, the martyred horse of the Prophet Muhammad, taken out in Muharram processions. This horse, white like Duldul, also shows the marked influence of the terracotta Bankura horses of West Bengal in its alert ears. Encountering the work of Chinese artist Xu Beihong in 1950, particularly his painting of a thousand horses, altered the nature of Husain’s own horses. The horse in this lot-a vital being arrested in furious motion-is exemplary of the vigour with which Husain charged his horses using Beihong’s as a model. Art critic Richard Bartholomew described the raw power contained within the artist’s restless forms, “[Husain’s] 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 colour 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.” (Richard Bartholomew, Richard Bartholomew and Shiv S Kapur, Husain, Hyderabad: Cinema Ghar, 2006, p. 20)

On the far right of the canvas is a woman, another of Husain’s most celebrated subjects. Here the woman strikes the tribhanga pose from classical Indian dance, with the figure creating a graceful S shape breaking at the hips and shoulders.. Husain chose to base his female form on classical Indian sculpture as he believed it more accurately represented Indian physicality in comparison to the archaic Western figuration young artists were trained to produce by the colonial education system. His travels in the 1940s and 1950s were instrumental in the development of his own figuration, this being the time he saw Mathura sculpture. Critic Shiv S Kapur noted the deep impact it had on Husain’s characterisation of the female figure, “The typical high-breasted and taut female figure of Mathura sculpture represented in his eyes a principle of energy and dynamism that was lacking in the more elegant figures of Ajanta paintings. This sculpturesque figure, which came to represent his essential approach to the female form, made its appearance in his work the first time in Man, painted in 1950. It has recurred frequently thereafter, sometimes as a composite and reconstructed image in the Picasso manner, or as tribhanga, the moment of preparation and gathering energy in classical Indian dance before the body breaks into movement… In almost every case it has been given the weight and definition of sculpture rather than painting.” (Shiv S Kapur, Richard Bartholomew and Shiv Kapur, Husain, Hyderabad: Cinema Ghar, 2006, pp. 37-38)

It is a male figure bearing striking likeness to the artist himself that dominates the canvas. Dressed in a shirt with the sleeves rolled up, the man leans back as if contemplating at leisure. Other animal motifs like the elephant and the white bird occupy the pictorial space around him. The elephant holds great cultural significance in India, most prominently in the form of the major Hindu deity Ganesh. The bird’s colour ties it to the white dove, an international symbol of peace. Birds also carry deep significance within the Hindu canon where they serve as vahanas for various gods.

Though Husain’s symbols may carry personal and cultural significance, critics have noted that the meaning they generate is through their interaction with each other within an individual composition. Critic Geeta Kapur summarises Husain’s remarkable ability to create contained meaning within a single work, “His art is studded with symbolic images that are introduced naturally and in continual juxtaposition with more explicit images. These symbols are not to be read in any literal sense. They are to be comprehended as they are painted, intuitively, with their own fluid logic. Their untold element reveals itself in relation to other happenings within the context and seldom needs outside reference… In his best paintings however, they perform actively; change meanings, relate unexpectedly to each other and establish new relationships within a fully integrated formal structure. Then Husain is able to create personal myths that are provocative, intimate inclusions into the unconscious.” (Geeta Kapur, Husain, Mumbai: Sadanga Series by Vakils, p. 3)

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