Important Notice

"So animated, so brisk was her walk,... I sat there aghast... looking at her, at her frail body bend at the back. She was in a coarse white cotton sari, worn in the Bengali style. Her face, her wrinkled skin was illuminated by an inner light." - M F HUSAIN

Husain's meeting with Mother Teresa, a decade before this painting was made, had a profound impact on the artist. Beginning with a series of works in 1980 that were... "So animated, so brisk was her walk,... I sat there aghast... looking at her, at her frail body bend at the back. She was in a coarse white cotton sari, worn in the Bengali style. Her face, her wrinkled skin was illuminated by an inner light." - M F HUSAIN

Husain's meeting with Mother Teresa, a decade before this painting was made, had a profound impact on the artist. Beginning with a series of works in 1980 that were exhibited three years later at the fashion house Pierre Cardin in Paris, Husain revisited Mother Teresa as a subject of his works several times in the years that followed. "I have tried to capture in my paintings what her presence meant to the destitute and the dying, the light and hope she brought by mere inquiry, by putting her hand over a child abandoned in a street. I did not cry at this encounter. I returned with so much strength and sadness that it continues to ferment within. That is why I try it again and again, after a gap of time, in a different medium. To translate that pain in my paintings, I think I will have to die of it." (Artist quoted in Ila Pal, Beyond the Canvas: An Unfinished Portrait of M F Husain, New Delhi: Indus, 1994, p. 166)

According to critics, Husain's preoccupation with Mother Teresa may have been rooted in the loss of his own mother during infancy and his yearning for a maternal figure. Husain's Mother Teresa is a faceless figure, more representational than realistic. She is a vehicle for conveying compassion, caring, and motherly love. In the present lot, she is identifiable by her iconic white saree with a blue border, surrounded by orphaned children and the destitute men and women whom she cared for all her life. "Perhaps the manifold yards of cloth could hold the lost and yearning child in Husain forever." (Yashodhara Dalmia, "A Metaphor for Modernity," The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 116)

To further his understanding of his vision of the saint, Husain travelled to Italy to study pre-Renaissance paintings of saints and apostles, and learned how to capture the folds of their robes, which according to him, "seemed capable of covering, canopying and sheltering." (Artist quoted in Pal, p. 166) "In Mother Teresa he found the universal mother, not as a face, but a presence where one could repose without guilt, become small, and lose oneself in her spacious lap..." (Pal, p. 166) Husain alludes to the Holy Trinity of Catholicism in this tripartite composition, and includes a rooster and a cow, rather than the animals in the manger, in a characteristic blending of cultural traditions.

The present lot was part of a significant exhibition of modern Indian art at the Metropolitan Pavilion in New York in 2001, one of the largest at the time, showcasing over 200 works by twelve Modernists.

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