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Lot Essay
Much has been written about Maqbool Fida Husain’s enigmatic paintings that frequently draw upon the emotions and the inner psychology of man to express the artist’s concerns. His larger-than-life canvases project narratives drawn from his memories and experiences of India and the world in a thoroughly modernist pictorial language.
Husain’s subject matter took a sharp turn in the 1980s when he viewed the Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel's 1977 film, That Obscure Object of Desire, for the first time, and embarked on a series of figurative paintings of the same title. The artist recalls, “I had been working on the Mahabharata series with its conflicts and I saw the Buñuel film. I decided immediately to turn to contemporary things” (Artist statement, D. Herwitz, Husain, Bombay, 1988, p. 26).
Buñuel's film follows the love story of an aging man who falls for a younger woman. Its narrative mines the frustrations of love and man’s desire. Husain’s works share the film’s themes of conflict, obsession and longing. The paintings from this series can be read as quasi-film stills, serving as fragmented metaphors for Buñuel's tumultuous plot. The present lot in particular mirrors the conflict and skepticism of identity that lie at the core of Buñuel's film. The female protagonist of the film is played by two actresses who portray her as alternately passionate and cruel, enticing and rejecting, and kind and humiliating. The woman is represented as an ‘obscure object’, whose identity is constantly in doubt. The identities of Husain’s figures are similarly obscured – the man’s face hidden by a floating plane and the woman depicted with no features other than a mouth open in seeming anguish.
The cinematic qualities of this painting are evident in Husain’s interplay of scale, contrasting color, vigorous brushstrokes and the bold composition. Both the figures exist in their individual spaces, suspended in a psychic landscape with planes intersecting their bodies and separating one from the other. Their bodies are turned away from each other, yet they are simultaneously arrested in the same unfamiliar and potentially threatening space.
As the critic Richard Bartholomew observed, "[Husain] uses colour emotively, in flat planes and subtle tones, amid restlessly active or strongly arresting lines. The world that he creates [...] tends to be a brooding, inward-turning world, lit by a black-haunting sun” (R. Bartholomew, Maqbool Fida Husain, New York, 1971, p. 42).
Husain’s subject matter took a sharp turn in the 1980s when he viewed the Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel's 1977 film, That Obscure Object of Desire, for the first time, and embarked on a series of figurative paintings of the same title. The artist recalls, “I had been working on the Mahabharata series with its conflicts and I saw the Buñuel film. I decided immediately to turn to contemporary things” (Artist statement, D. Herwitz, Husain, Bombay, 1988, p. 26).
Buñuel's film follows the love story of an aging man who falls for a younger woman. Its narrative mines the frustrations of love and man’s desire. Husain’s works share the film’s themes of conflict, obsession and longing. The paintings from this series can be read as quasi-film stills, serving as fragmented metaphors for Buñuel's tumultuous plot. The present lot in particular mirrors the conflict and skepticism of identity that lie at the core of Buñuel's film. The female protagonist of the film is played by two actresses who portray her as alternately passionate and cruel, enticing and rejecting, and kind and humiliating. The woman is represented as an ‘obscure object’, whose identity is constantly in doubt. The identities of Husain’s figures are similarly obscured – the man’s face hidden by a floating plane and the woman depicted with no features other than a mouth open in seeming anguish.
The cinematic qualities of this painting are evident in Husain’s interplay of scale, contrasting color, vigorous brushstrokes and the bold composition. Both the figures exist in their individual spaces, suspended in a psychic landscape with planes intersecting their bodies and separating one from the other. Their bodies are turned away from each other, yet they are simultaneously arrested in the same unfamiliar and potentially threatening space.
As the critic Richard Bartholomew observed, "[Husain] uses colour emotively, in flat planes and subtle tones, amid restlessly active or strongly arresting lines. The world that he creates [...] tends to be a brooding, inward-turning world, lit by a black-haunting sun” (R. Bartholomew, Maqbool Fida Husain, New York, 1971, p. 42).