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Lot 52

 

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One off?beat foot step of Gaja Gamini brought her to my dormant door. A gentle knock and an entirely new chapter opened up, “Yeh Kaunsa Modh Hai Umar Ka!”
- M F HUSAIN

M F Husain’s devotion to art was rivalled only by his enduring love for cinema. After moving from Indore to Bombay at age 19 or 20 in 1936, he famously supported himself by painting film billboards. Decades later, the same child who had once slipped out of... One off?beat foot step of Gaja Gamini brought her to my dormant door. A gentle knock and an entirely new chapter opened up, “Yeh Kaunsa Modh Hai Umar Ka!”
- M F HUSAIN

M F Husain’s devotion to art was rivalled only by his enduring love for cinema. After moving from Indore to Bombay at age 19 or 20 in 1936, he famously supported himself by painting film billboards. Decades later, the same child who had once slipped out of his evening art classes to watch a movie at the local theatre became a filmmaker himself with Through the Eyes of a Painter (1967), an experimental short that went on to win the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival. Husain admired the work of auteurs such as Federico Fellini, Luis Buñuel, and Ritwik Ghatak, and later cultivated friendships with Roberto Rossellini, Ingmar Bergman, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Satyajit Ray. Cinema continued to fuel his artistic imagination: his 1980s series That Obscure Object of Desire reflects themes of longing and obsession from Buñuel’s 1977 film, while other canvases pay tribute to Ray’s Pather Panchali and Shatranj Ke Khiladi.

Even in his eighties, Husain’s fascination with the silver screen showed no signs of fading. As the apocryphal story goes, he watched Sooraj Barjatya’s blockbuster Bollywood film Hum Aap Ke Hai Koun…! in 1995 and came away enchanted by its lead actor, Madhuri Dixit. Film journalist Khalid Mohamed recounts, “M F was literally dancing in the aisles. Every evening in every town in every part of the world, he saw the film repeatedly. Practically everyone, including his friends, were convinced that M F had finally gone senile… M F persisted in dating her, unapologetically on the 35mm screen. He was devastated by her body language, her smile, by every little breath she took right before him.” (Khalid Mohamed, “Madhuri”, Where Art Thou: MF Husain ? An Autobiography, Mumbai: M F Husain Foundation and Pundole Art Gallery, 2002, p. 244) Estimates of how many times he rewatched the film range widely from 20 to 80, but what is indisputable is whether “airbound or earthbound”, Dixit began to occupy every corner of his imagination.

Infatuated and inspired by his newfound muse, Husain began a series of paintings featuring Dixit, based on his own interpretation of the film. The title Yeh Kaun Sa Mod Hai Umar Ka (What is This Phase of Life) borrows from a song from the film but also suggests the renewed creative energy that the actor awakened in him. To him she represented the ideal Indian woman. “Madhuri Dixit embodies all that is essential to be a perfect woman. Film makers of the past have not been able to capture onehundredth of all that there is to the woman,” he once explained. (Artist quoted in Sudipta Basu, “Different Strokes”, M F Husain, Khalid Mohamed et al, The Genesis of Gaja Gamini, Ahmedabad: H2A Graphics International, 2000, p. 179)

The present lot brings together some of Dixit’s memorable scenes from Hum Aap Ke Hai Koun…!—including an appearance from its iconic canine matchmaker Tuffy—composed as vignettes across a 14?foot?long Mylar sheet that unfolds like a film strip. Husain also portrays her as Shakuntala, the heroine of poet Kalidasa’s fifth?century play of the same name, widely considered to be one of the greatest works of Indian literature. Striking the graceful tribhanga (triaxial) pose, the details of her form echo that of classical Indian dance and sculpture. She is endowed with the elegance of “Gaja Gamini: she who walks with the grace and gait of an elephant…” (Geeti Sen, “Gaja Gamini: The Act of Transformation”, Husain, Mohamed et al, p. 176) As he explained, “When the British ruled we were taught to draw a figure with the proportions from Greek and Roman sculpture... In the East, the human form is an entirely different structure... The way a woman walks in the village there are three breaks, from the feet, the hips and shoulder... they move in rhythm.” (Artist quoted in Yashodhara Dalmia, “A Metaphor for Modernity”, The Making of Modern Indian Art, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 102)

In the panel to the right, the artist refers to Padmini, Mohini and Shankhini, three ideals or typologies of womanhood referred to in the ancient Indian Shastras or scriptures, effortlessly establishing a continuum between contemporary pop culture, the language of Indian modernism, and ancient Indian mythology in his inimitable style. Three years after he produced this work, Dixit went on to embody several such archetypes of the ideal woman, including Shakuntala, in Husain’s first feature film Gaja Gamini. Prior to the shooting of the film in 1998, he created a similar 100?foot?long storyboard, which he later developed into Art & Cinema, a book he wrote and illustrated by hand.

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