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Descriptif du lot
Throughout his artistic career, which extended over eight decades, Maqbool Fida Husain championed Indian cultural traditions in his paintings in an effort to capture and express his fascination with rasa, or the concept of aesthetic rapture. The interdisciplinary nature of music, sculpture, dance, painting and film provided enormous inspiration to the artist. “[Husain] has tuned himself into the disciplines of several arts. The vibrations of dance, music and Urdu poetry are caught in a jagged thrust of lines and colors. He can draw and paint with complete surrender to the sound and graphic representations of these modes. Musical rhythm or pure sound finds its way easily into the schemes of the paintings” (R. Shahani, Let History Cut Across Me without Me, New Delhi, 1993, p. 1).
The present lot, a monumental joyous painting, represents the apogee of Husain’s efforts to express rasa and the interconnectedness of Indian classical music and visual art. Painted live on stage at the Tata Theatre in Mumbai in January 1988 to the melodious singing of renowned Hindustani classical vocalist Pandit Bhimsen Joshi, this largely abstract canvas celebrates the spirit of music and aims to capture the elusive sense of rapture it generates in musicians and their audiences.
One of the reporters who attended this joint performance, which was staged for a charitable cause, noted that “In one light or another, [Husain] is constantly in the spotlight. This time, there were two artist(e)s – but on a single stage. Master painter M.F. Husain’s new gimmick had him painting renowned vocalist Pandit Bhimsen Joshi in full song – at the centenary celebrations of the Bombay Art Society. The painting fetched a tidy sum indeed – the canvas was snapped up for Rs 5 lakh, to be used to fund the Bendre-Husain scholarship for young artists. While Joshi called the whole thing ‘an adventure’, said Husain about his subject: ‘He (Joshi) is a great performer. He puts his entire being into singing, which is very picturesque.’ The idea of tacking on a performance to a performance must indeed be unique – but one wonders whether the audience delighted their ears or their eyes. Or whether the surfeit of sight and sound proved too much” (‘Master painter M.F. Husain paints vocalist Pandit Bhimsen Joshi in full song’, India Today, 15 February 1988).
Describing the event himself, Husain recalled, “I was putting forward a pictorial proposition or theorem which had to be resolved on the canvas. I wanted to structure pure sound, using colours for their own energy. At the same time, I wanted to transmute the abstraction inherent in Indian classical music through colour association [...] I like the word riyaaz used commonly in classical music. A musician practices each note to perfection… until it acquires the required depth and density. One single note of such a musician can transform the atmosphere. It can strike your being like an arrow. Bhimsenji proved what I mean by this” (Artist statement, I. Pal, Husain, Portrait of an Artist, Noida, 2017, pp. 127, 129).
Drawing on the venerable tradition of visualizing individual ragas through specific moods, colors, emotions, times of day and even weather patterns, in this painting Husain also stresses his debt to classical Indian artistic traditions like ragamala painting. In The Happening (Musical Fantasia), a title which captures both the performative spirit of the present lot, Husain conveys the sound of the ragas Pandit Bhimsen Joshi sang with the colors on his palette and gestures of his brush. “When Husain reacted, he did so to the absoluteness of music, its abstractness. He used colours to convey the density of Bhimsen Joshi’s notes, the purity of their brilliance” (I. Pal, Husain, Portrait of an Artist, Noida, 2017, p. 128).
Following the 1988 event, Husain produced a short film that documented the performance under his banner Cinema Ghar. Titled Jugalbandi, the film extended this unique collaboration to a third artistic genre, capturing the spirit of the combined performance of Joshi and Husain for many future generations of audiences to experience.
The present lot, a monumental joyous painting, represents the apogee of Husain’s efforts to express rasa and the interconnectedness of Indian classical music and visual art. Painted live on stage at the Tata Theatre in Mumbai in January 1988 to the melodious singing of renowned Hindustani classical vocalist Pandit Bhimsen Joshi, this largely abstract canvas celebrates the spirit of music and aims to capture the elusive sense of rapture it generates in musicians and their audiences.
One of the reporters who attended this joint performance, which was staged for a charitable cause, noted that “In one light or another, [Husain] is constantly in the spotlight. This time, there were two artist(e)s – but on a single stage. Master painter M.F. Husain’s new gimmick had him painting renowned vocalist Pandit Bhimsen Joshi in full song – at the centenary celebrations of the Bombay Art Society. The painting fetched a tidy sum indeed – the canvas was snapped up for Rs 5 lakh, to be used to fund the Bendre-Husain scholarship for young artists. While Joshi called the whole thing ‘an adventure’, said Husain about his subject: ‘He (Joshi) is a great performer. He puts his entire being into singing, which is very picturesque.’ The idea of tacking on a performance to a performance must indeed be unique – but one wonders whether the audience delighted their ears or their eyes. Or whether the surfeit of sight and sound proved too much” (‘Master painter M.F. Husain paints vocalist Pandit Bhimsen Joshi in full song’, India Today, 15 February 1988).
Describing the event himself, Husain recalled, “I was putting forward a pictorial proposition or theorem which had to be resolved on the canvas. I wanted to structure pure sound, using colours for their own energy. At the same time, I wanted to transmute the abstraction inherent in Indian classical music through colour association [...] I like the word riyaaz used commonly in classical music. A musician practices each note to perfection… until it acquires the required depth and density. One single note of such a musician can transform the atmosphere. It can strike your being like an arrow. Bhimsenji proved what I mean by this” (Artist statement, I. Pal, Husain, Portrait of an Artist, Noida, 2017, pp. 127, 129).
Drawing on the venerable tradition of visualizing individual ragas through specific moods, colors, emotions, times of day and even weather patterns, in this painting Husain also stresses his debt to classical Indian artistic traditions like ragamala painting. In The Happening (Musical Fantasia), a title which captures both the performative spirit of the present lot, Husain conveys the sound of the ragas Pandit Bhimsen Joshi sang with the colors on his palette and gestures of his brush. “When Husain reacted, he did so to the absoluteness of music, its abstractness. He used colours to convey the density of Bhimsen Joshi’s notes, the purity of their brilliance” (I. Pal, Husain, Portrait of an Artist, Noida, 2017, p. 128).
Following the 1988 event, Husain produced a short film that documented the performance under his banner Cinema Ghar. Titled Jugalbandi, the film extended this unique collaboration to a third artistic genre, capturing the spirit of the combined performance of Joshi and Husain for many future generations of audiences to experience.