Lot 33

 

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“[Husain’s] women are monumental in their fortitude and yet humble and ordinary in a duality that Husain expresses effortlessly...”

M F Husain’s oeuvre is defined by his devotion to the human form which he uses as “the vehicle for his exploration of the nature and drama of reality.” (Shiv S Kapur, Husain, Richard Bartholomew and Shiv S Kapur, Hyderabad: Cinema Ghar, 2006, p. 36) An artist who spent most of his life based out of... “[Husain’s] women are monumental in their fortitude and yet humble and ordinary in a duality that Husain expresses effortlessly...”

M F Husain’s oeuvre is defined by his devotion to the human form which he uses as “the vehicle for his exploration of the nature and drama of reality.” (Shiv S Kapur, Husain, Richard Bartholomew and Shiv S Kapur, Hyderabad: Cinema Ghar, 2006, p. 36) An artist who spent most of his life based out of India, he was of the conviction that the human form must be acknowledged when creating art in a place as populous as his home country. Emphasising the significance of humanity to his work he remarked, “Human beings, that’s all that’s really interesting. You paint and you draw in order to learn how to look at human beings, how to look at yourself.” (Artist quoted in Bartholomew and Kapur, p. 36)

Woman, especially, is one of Husain’s most important subjects beginning with his emotive depictions of working class women around his neighbourhood at the start of his career. Says Kapur, “The central concern of Husain’s art, and its dominant motif, is woman... Spiritually, woman is more enduring. Pain comes naturally to her, as do compassion and a sense of the birth and death of things. In Husain’s work, woman has the gift of eagerness, often expressed in... an inward attentiveness, as if she were listening to the life coursing within her.” (Bartholomew and Kapur, p. 46) In the present lot, titled Two Women, a group of female figures cluster together next to a tree. Husain renders the women as simple distorted forms devoid of any identifying characteristics in the form of clothing, ornamentation or facial features. This lack of individuation is in keeping with the grouping of their bodies which Husain uses to signal their working class identity. The austerity of their forms, bound in Husain’s iconic bold black lines, emphasises their remoteness. Art historian Yashodhara Dalmia notes the “invisible veil” that Husain’s women seem to wear which keeps them at a remove from the viewer. (Yashodhara Dalmia, The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 111) “It has to be noted that while women proliferate on his canvases, they are desexualised… Husain’s women have been imbued with an ascetism and an angularity...Their nudity then, far from being offensive is akin to the innocence of grace and of purity which denotes a godliness.” (Yashodhara Dalmia, “M.F. Husain: Re?inventing India”, M.F. Husain: Early Masterpieces 1950s-70s, London: Asia House Gallery, 2006)

This painting is one of Husain’s earliest forays into abstraction and was exhibited as part of Gallery 59’s opening show by Bal Chhabda on 26 January 1959. The show, opened by influential critic Rudi von Leyden, also featured works by V S Gaitonde, Krishen Khanna and fellow Progressive Artists’ Group member Tyeb Mehta. Western Expressionism grew into a formative influence on the artist in Bombay in the 1940s. Inducted into the Progressive Artists’ Group by F N Souza, Husain was thrown into the orbit of European emigres like Rudi von Leyden, Emanuel Schlesinger, and Walter Langhammer who encouraged him to study artists like Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele. Expressionism certainly informed the distortion here but it was not the sole tradition Husain drew from. Classical Indian art like miniatures, whose influence is evident in the vibrant colours of the present lot, were equally as instrumental in the development of Husain’s pictorial style. Shiv S Kapur notes the philosophical core of the distortion in Indian miniature painting adopted by Husain: “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 recreation. 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.” (Bartholomew and Kapur, p. 36)

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