Important Notice

“Line is a virile force with keen latent mobility, which in spite of being imperceptible in nature, is constantly striving to assert itself.” — M F HUSAIN

M F Husain’s twilight years saw him look west to the Arab civilisation for inspiration; from this came his series based on the Arab world which prominently featured Yemen, the land to which his Suleimani Bohra ancestors traced their lineage. He held a soft spot for the country,... “Line is a virile force with keen latent mobility, which in spite of being imperceptible in nature, is constantly striving to assert itself.” — M F HUSAIN

M F Husain’s twilight years saw him look west to the Arab civilisation for inspiration; from this came his series based on the Arab world which prominently featured Yemen, the land to which his Suleimani Bohra ancestors traced their lineage. He held a soft spot for the country, with his 2008 work Warriors and Poets featuring these words valourising it, “Yemen is that of a silence in which the echoes of time past and early beginnings of the future/ The new world has not replaced the old Yemen of poets and warriors.” (Ranjit Hoskote, Bruce B Lawrence, Shuddhabrata Sengupta et al, M. F. Husain: Horses of the Sun, Qatar: Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, 2020, p. 82) The present lot bears many of the same motifs – camels, palm trees, and figures garbed in the traditional clothes of West Asia – which identified Yemen in his Arab civilisation series.

Like the rest of his body of work, Husain’s deeply felt Indianness informs the very nature of this lot. He paints the Yemeni landscape in the passionate colours of medieval Indian miniatures, marrying his Arab influences to an Indian sensibility. Indian miniatures influence the distorted two?dimensional figuration here just as much as the artist’s early brush with German Expressionism. Art critic Shiv S Kapur notes Husain’s induction into a distinctly Indian tradition of distortion through the miniatures, “We must remember that emotive distortion was nothing new to the Indian artist. His effort had always been to render the quintessential form, that which represented the intrinsic nature of the object as perceived by him. In the classical sculpture and later in the miniature painting, form was perceived as an ideogram, the bearer of a familiar idea or emotion renewed and recharged with meaning in the process of re?creation. Actuality was viewed as no more than the manifest dimension of reality: other dimensions lay hidden behind it, and the natural form in art only hinted at their presence.” (Richard Bartholomew and Shiv S Kapur, Husain, New York: Harry N Abrams, 1972, p. 36)

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