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Lot Essay
“It was in the early years, that Maqbool Fida Husain created the essential idiom for his art and it provided him with the navigational resources for his later journey. The layered vocabulary of his paintings, as complex as India itself, also set the tone for his preoccupation which was to tap the pulse of a nation in its making, viewing it from the street as it were. In doing so he virtually re-invented India and he continues to do this at each stage of his art” (Y. Dalmia, ‘M.F. Husain: Re-inventing India’, M.F. Husain: Early Masterpieces 1950s-70s, London, 2006, unpaginated).
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 large-format canvases project narratives drawn from his memories and experiences of India and the world in a thoroughly modernist pictorial language. One of the founding members of the seminal Progressive Artists’ Group (PAG), Husain and his fellow artists absorbed the forms and idioms of Indian folk art, classical painting and sculpture, combining them with Western styles and techniques to produce a unique mode of expression – a new, modern art for India. Emerging as a cultural standard bearer in independent India, Husain’s art exalted in the liberation of the new democracy but never hid from the painful legacies of its birth. Although the PAG was disbanded after only a few years, it was as impactful as it was brief, propelling Husain and his contemporaries to become widely regarded as the most renowned figures in the story of modern Indian art.
In Untitled (The Wind), Husain’s characteristic engagement with featureless, anonymized female figures is evident. Identity is shaped instead through the relationships and spaces his figures inhabit. Here, the flying figure of a woman sweeps across the water, her hair streaming behind her as she seems to propel two boats forward. A personification of the wind, she appears to guide a sailor as he navigates the dark waters in his vessel, unaware of the force driving him onward. Executed in shades of gold against a murky background, she becomes a resplendent emblem of freedom, movement and perhaps even enlightenment.
The woman, the mother, the timeless feminine, hidden in both memory and longing is a theme Husain constantly returned to in his work. The present lot embodies the ambiguity and mystery of the artist’s memories and longing; however, it also addresses the way in which Husain saw the female form “as an embodiment of womanhood, of purity and strength” (K. Mohamed, M.F. Husain, Where Art Thou, Mumbai, 2002, p. xxx). Whether he chooses to depict women in simple rural settings attending to everyday chores, as all-powerful goddesses, both munificent and wrathful, astride galloping stallions traversing the skies, or representing the power of nature as in this painting, Husain’s female figures are a hallmark of his work, symbolic of beauty, strength and fortitude.
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 large-format canvases project narratives drawn from his memories and experiences of India and the world in a thoroughly modernist pictorial language. One of the founding members of the seminal Progressive Artists’ Group (PAG), Husain and his fellow artists absorbed the forms and idioms of Indian folk art, classical painting and sculpture, combining them with Western styles and techniques to produce a unique mode of expression – a new, modern art for India. Emerging as a cultural standard bearer in independent India, Husain’s art exalted in the liberation of the new democracy but never hid from the painful legacies of its birth. Although the PAG was disbanded after only a few years, it was as impactful as it was brief, propelling Husain and his contemporaries to become widely regarded as the most renowned figures in the story of modern Indian art.
In Untitled (The Wind), Husain’s characteristic engagement with featureless, anonymized female figures is evident. Identity is shaped instead through the relationships and spaces his figures inhabit. Here, the flying figure of a woman sweeps across the water, her hair streaming behind her as she seems to propel two boats forward. A personification of the wind, she appears to guide a sailor as he navigates the dark waters in his vessel, unaware of the force driving him onward. Executed in shades of gold against a murky background, she becomes a resplendent emblem of freedom, movement and perhaps even enlightenment.
The woman, the mother, the timeless feminine, hidden in both memory and longing is a theme Husain constantly returned to in his work. The present lot embodies the ambiguity and mystery of the artist’s memories and longing; however, it also addresses the way in which Husain saw the female form “as an embodiment of womanhood, of purity and strength” (K. Mohamed, M.F. Husain, Where Art Thou, Mumbai, 2002, p. xxx). Whether he chooses to depict women in simple rural settings attending to everyday chores, as all-powerful goddesses, both munificent and wrathful, astride galloping stallions traversing the skies, or representing the power of nature as in this painting, Husain’s female figures are a hallmark of his work, symbolic of beauty, strength and fortitude.