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Lot Essay
“My mother Zainab died when I was two years old. I had fallen seriously ill and her desperate prayer was that her life should be taken and mine spared. That is exactly what happened. Though alive I counted myself extremely unfortunate. Can anyone make up the loss of a mother? I didn’t even have a picture of her. She refused to get herself photographed. In those days people were afraid of the camera. They thought it cast an evil eye and shortened life. Sadly, I have nothing which remotely resembles or reminds me of my mother. She is just a name to me, not even a memory” (Artist statement, Y. Dalmia, ‘A Metaphor for Modernity: Maqbool Fida Husain’, The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, New Delhi, 2001, p. 111).
Over the course of his long career, the paired figures of mother and child have been recurring in Maqbool Fida Husain’s practice. Perhaps as a way of grappling with the loss of his mother when he was a child, and the absence of any visual remnants of her, the artist’s maternal figures are usually depicted as anonymous, either shrouded in a veil or without facial features. The present lot is unique for its depiction of a figure of the Madonna without a veil obscuring her face. Here, Husain reverses his tendencies by depicting her with a gentle and poignant expression, and instead painting the Christ child without any particular features.
This large painting is created in Husain’s typical bold and expressive style, with color-blocked areas and bright hues of red and green standing out against more muted shades of grey. The figures, identifiable as the icons of the Virgin Mary and Christ through the halo around his head and the veil framing her face, are otherwise composed using simple, fragmented forms, nearly verging on complete abstraction.
Throughout his career, Husain has painted several images recontextualizing religious and cultural icons such as the Virgin Mary, Mother Teresa and Hindu Goddesses. Even when breaking these figures down to their essential, almost abstracted forms, Husain succeeds in imbuing them with notions of care, yearning and maternal love. “Sometimes the subjects are women no longer in their youth, but there is not stress on age, for not that, but womankind, or femininity, is Husain’s theme” (S. Kapur, Husain, New York, 1972, p. 20).
Over the course of his long career, the paired figures of mother and child have been recurring in Maqbool Fida Husain’s practice. Perhaps as a way of grappling with the loss of his mother when he was a child, and the absence of any visual remnants of her, the artist’s maternal figures are usually depicted as anonymous, either shrouded in a veil or without facial features. The present lot is unique for its depiction of a figure of the Madonna without a veil obscuring her face. Here, Husain reverses his tendencies by depicting her with a gentle and poignant expression, and instead painting the Christ child without any particular features.
This large painting is created in Husain’s typical bold and expressive style, with color-blocked areas and bright hues of red and green standing out against more muted shades of grey. The figures, identifiable as the icons of the Virgin Mary and Christ through the halo around his head and the veil framing her face, are otherwise composed using simple, fragmented forms, nearly verging on complete abstraction.
Throughout his career, Husain has painted several images recontextualizing religious and cultural icons such as the Virgin Mary, Mother Teresa and Hindu Goddesses. Even when breaking these figures down to their essential, almost abstracted forms, Husain succeeds in imbuing them with notions of care, yearning and maternal love. “Sometimes the subjects are women no longer in their youth, but there is not stress on age, for not that, but womankind, or femininity, is Husain’s theme” (S. Kapur, Husain, New York, 1972, p. 20).