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Lot 51

 

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At its heart, M F Husain’s art was rooted in Indian culture and reflected his belief in the interdisciplinary nature of music, dance, sculpture, and film. In 1948, a visit to Rashtrapati Bhavan in New Delhi with fellow Progressive Artists’ Group member F N Souza proved pivotal, exposing him to India’s classical art traditions which shaped the development of his signature style. From Gupta sculpture and Chola bronzes, Husain absorbed the... At its heart, M F Husain’s art was rooted in Indian culture and reflected his belief in the interdisciplinary nature of music, dance, sculpture, and film. In 1948, a visit to Rashtrapati Bhavan in New Delhi with fellow Progressive Artists’ Group member F N Souza proved pivotal, exposing him to India’s classical art traditions which shaped the development of his signature style. From Gupta sculpture and Chola bronzes, Husain absorbed the ability to express rhythm, movement, and the sensuous vitality of the human form. The vivid hues and structured surfaces of Basholi School miniatures inspired his bold palette and compositional approach. To these, he added the spontaneity and innocence of India’s rich folk art traditions, weaving these influences together into a unique and modern pictorial idiom.

Highlighting this mastery that positioned him among India’s foremost modernists, Ebrahim Alkazi writes, “Behind every stroke of the artist’s brush is a vast hinterland of traditional concepts, forms, meanings [...] It is in this fundamental sense that we speak of Husain being in the authentic tradition of Indian art. He has been unique in his ability to forge a pictorial language which is indisputably of the contemporary Indian situation but surcharged with all the energies, the rhythms of his art heritage.” (Ebrahim Alkazi, “M F Husain: The Modern Artist and Tradition”, M.F. Husain, New Delhi: Art Heritage, 1978, p. 3)

The present lot from the early 1970s appears to be a continuation of a series of works paying homage to Indian classical music and dance that Husain created between the 1950s and late 1960s. Here he reimagines the ragamala tradition of Indian miniature painting through a distinctly modernist lens. In classical Indian music, a raga is a melodic framework intended to evoke a specific emotion or atmosphere, known as rasa, in the listener. Each raga is traditionally linked to a particular time of day or season, and many were believed to possess supernatural powers, such as invoking rainfall. Similarly, Ragamala paintings—which were popular in Indian courts from as early as the 15th century—translated these musical moods into visual form through the expressive use of colour.

This painting draws on the nocturnal ragas Savani and Des. Husain depicts dusk as a delicate threshold between day and night, light and darkness, and captures the fleeting transitory moments when these ragas are meant to be sung. The encroaching black that spreads across the surface from right to left signifies the arrival of night, which will soon envelop the singer, part woman, part peacock, silencing her song until the next nightfall. He uses his most recognisable pictorial elements, particularly angular forms, bold contours, and a flattened perspective, to skilfully distill the emotion and essence of these two ragas into a graceful composition. His interest in classical Indian sculpture is evident in his rendering of the female figure, whose body follows the graceful tribhanga (triaxial bend) characteristic of Indian sculptural tradition. The simplified form is powerfully delineated with confident, economical lines. As art historian Yashodhara Dalmia notes, “Above all else, it was the line that was Husain’s strongest element and he used it with a bounding energy in his work. The deft strokes that came from an early acquaintance with calligraphy now encased the figure in simple, economic points of intersection.” (Yashodhara Dalmia, “A Metaphor for Modernity”, The Making of Modern Indian Art, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 109)

The poetic imagery of the present lot thus conveys a profound, innate understanding of the elements of form, movement and music that scaffolded Husain’s oeuvre. Critic Shiv Kapur remarks, “He views each painting as a fragment of music whose counterpoint exists elsewhere, and his entire painterly activity as one immense effort at orchestration of all the notes that he hears struck upon his personality. No painting is intended as a complete statement.” (Shiv S Kapur, Husain, Richard Bartholomew and Shiv S Kapur, New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc, 1972, p. 60)

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