Important Notice

From the tremendous extent of M F Husain’s body of works, paintings of horses have emerged as the most defining of his artistic identity. Aware of the popularity and admiration for his horses, Husain lightheartedly said in an interview, “I say this about myself: I sell horses and make films.” (Artist quoted in Bikram Singh, “Of Horses and Other Animals,” Maqbool Fida Husain, New Delhi: Rahul and Art, 2008, p. 169) Over the course of his... From the tremendous extent of M F Husain’s body of works, paintings of horses have emerged as the most defining of his artistic identity. Aware of the popularity and admiration for his horses, Husain lightheartedly said in an interview, “I say this about myself: I sell horses and make films.” (Artist quoted in Bikram Singh, “Of Horses and Other Animals,” Maqbool Fida Husain, New Delhi: Rahul and Art, 2008, p. 169) Over the course of his career, the form of the horse became both a universal and personal expression, for Husain they were more than a motif in his works, signifying two pertinent values of grace and freedom.

Husain’s artistic exercises are fuelled by his celebratory outlook towards the syncretic culture of India and also drawn from its various sources. He explains, “I have not seen these wild animals in the jungle. I have seen them imprisoned in stone on the walls of Khajuraho, Konark, Mahabalipuram - the temples of medieval India.”(Bikram Singh, p.169) A major influence also came from the iconic sculpture of Duldul, Imam Husain’s horse in the battle of Karbala, which was carried around as a part of the procession of Muharram that he often watched as a child. The form of Duldul was toy-like and in a rising posture with the front legs stretched out, the dynamism of which can be convincingly associated with Husain’s works as well. Consequently, on his visit to China in 1952, he is said to have studied the Sung dynasty renderings of horses and met Xu Beihong, who at that time was extremely popular as a painter of horses. He was deeply moved and experienced an awakening on witnessing a monumental work of a thousand horses at Xu’s studio. Husain had then found a way to channel the spirit of Duldul from his childhood onto the canvas, transformed as his individualistic artistic expression.

Husain imbued his equine figures with a sense of mythic power and virility, as vehicles for change in the world. “The 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 is transformed in the activity of paint... When we look at these creatures we must remember that the animal is not the subject of Husain’s painting; it is the daemonic principle that he depicts, and to him it is neither good nor bad... the horses... have become symbols of power and pursuit, or of mysterious encounters.” (Richard Bartholomew and Shiv S Kapur, Husain, New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc, 1972, p. 20)

The present lot depicts a prancing horse in mature shades of ochre against a split background of olive green and brown. The pictorial frame combines a powerful and valiant horse that gallops forward with an open neighing mouth, an identifiable human figure with its back turned at us, along with bold and defined text evoking his youthful training in calligraphy. He extensively practised Kufic khat that taught him controlled lettering and tughra which taught the balance between improvisation and rigid discipline of line to achieve a structural use of Arabic lettering. The evocation of the calligraphic line also confirms the element of the heavy lines that he uses to separate the colours in the painting, specifically here the contours of the horse. The present lot exemplifies scholar Jaya Appaswamy’s remark that “with Husain’s work the subject matter though recognizable is no longer of interest as a point of departure. The real interest lies in his juxtaposition of line and colour.” (Bikram Singh, 2008, p. 368)

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