Important Notice

"Art has to evolve from your very being, like my horses…I see them as ageless and immortal. They draw chariots in the great epics, they stand proudly in the poorest stables, they are embodiments of strength like the dragons of China" (M.F. Husain, Where Art Thou: An Autobiography with Khalid Mohammad, Mumbai, 2002, p. xxii).

One of the most powerful icons in Husain's oeuvre, the horse, is a symbol of passion, strength, free-will and... "Art has to evolve from your very being, like my horses…I see them as ageless and immortal. They draw chariots in the great epics, they stand proudly in the poorest stables, they are embodiments of strength like the dragons of China" (M.F. Husain, Where Art Thou: An Autobiography with Khalid Mohammad, Mumbai, 2002, p. xxii).

One of the most powerful icons in Husain's oeuvre, the horse, is a symbol of passion, strength, free-will and vitality. The artist's encounters with the equestrian figure began as early as his childhood days in Indore, spent in the company of his grandfather's friend Achan Mian the farrier, and extended to his visits to China and Europe in the 1950s and 60s. "The horse as a multidimensional symbolic motif was itself to interest Husain deeply. During his travels in China in 1952 he studied the Sung dynasty renderings of horses. Later, in Europe, where as he found the Renaissance horses unexciting, he was strongly attracted by Franz Marc's work and Marino Marini's archaic equestrian sculpture, with its balance between horizontal and vertical lines to achieve a feeling of solitary and monumental anguish. Husain's own use of the horse motif has been, however more intuitive and complex…[Husain's horses] are subterranean creatures. Their nature is not intellectualized; it is rendered as a sensation or as abstract movement, with a capacity to stir up vague premonitions and passions in a mixture of ritualistic fear and exultant anguish" (Richard Bartholomew and Shiv Kapur, Husain, Harry N. Abrams Inc., New York, 1972, p. 39, 40).

In the present lot, a painting of a rider and a horse against vivid crimson and yellow background, the man and the animal resonate with multiple meanings. Born of Husain's strong line and thick brushwork, the horse bucks and paws at the ground, its eagerness to carry its rider forth evident. At one with its rider, whose bearded figure resembles that of the artist, the animal is rendered as a portent of change, endowed with the powers it is accorded in Hindu mythology as a symbol of the sun, knowledge and fertility.

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