Important Notice

“In his drive to create an Indian contemporary art, M.F. Husain has become a master of myth, not only portraying deities and episodes from the Mahabharata and Ramayana, but in projecting historical figures into the transcendent realm of the mythic…His ‘Mother Teresa’ series similarly uses her distinctive habit and her hands to effect a transformation of the historical to the mythic, the mortal to the eternal” (Susan Bean, “Now, Then, Beyond Time... “In his drive to create an Indian contemporary art, M.F. Husain has become a master of myth, not only portraying deities and episodes from the Mahabharata and Ramayana, but in projecting historical figures into the transcendent realm of the mythic…His ‘Mother Teresa’ series similarly uses her distinctive habit and her hands to effect a transformation of the historical to the mythic, the mortal to the eternal” (Susan Bean, “Now, Then, Beyond Time in India’s Contemporary Art”, Contemporary Indian Art: Other Realities, Marg, Mumbai, 2002, p. 48).

Since his first meeting with Mother Teresa in the early 1980s, Husain has painted several works that feature the ‘Saint of Calcutta’ as their central subject. Speaking of this meeting and his ensuing fascination with her figure with profound reverence in a 1994 interview, Husain said, “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 the 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” (as quoted in Ila Pal, Beyond the Canvas: An Unfinished Portrait of M.F. Husain, South Asia Books, New Delhi, 1994).

In the present lot, Husain offers two images of Mother Teresa; one extending the comfort of her arms and lap to the poor, and the other sheltering two white doves symbolic of universal love and peace. Though she is robed in her distinctive white sari, here, as in all of Husain’s portraits of her, Mother Teresa remains faceless, reflecting a broader engagement with the notion of motherhood on the part of the artist. Having lost his own mother when he was very young, and unable to remember her features, these works represent, perhaps, the artist’s attempt to reconstruct his past through the ideal of motherhood. He “…collected the inky darkness of obscurity into the folds of white clothes and created a metaphor by infusing his feelings of deep reverence into the image created” (Rashda Siddiqui, In Conversation with Husain Paintings, New Delhi, 2001, p. 204.)

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