Important Notice

“For me painting is the sheer joy of colour and lines.”
- M F HUSAIN

The human figure was central to M F Husain’s work; his rootedness in a land teeming with life gave rise to the need to represent it in his art. The present lot features two figures positioned laying down so as to echo each other. Husain’s composition here prefigures his series of works based on the Mahabharata in which he often depicted female... “For me painting is the sheer joy of colour and lines.”
- M F HUSAIN

The human figure was central to M F Husain’s work; his rootedness in a land teeming with life gave rise to the need to represent it in his art. The present lot features two figures positioned laying down so as to echo each other. Husain’s composition here prefigures his series of works based on the Mahabharata in which he often depicted female personifications of the Hindu river goddesses Ganga and Jamuna. He occasionally arranged his Ganga-Jamuna compositions-including a work in the Peabody Essex Museum’s Chester and Davida Herwitz Collection-in a similar manner to this painting. The supine body resting against a flat single-colour background shows up elsewhere in the Mahabharata series. The listless quality of the forms in the present lot is reminiscent of Husain’s painting of the death of Ganga’s son Bhishma in one of the epic’s defining scenes.

Husain was profoundly affected by the drama of the sweeping Hindu epics he heard as a child. Even as an adult, he would listen to live recitations of the Mahabharata and Ramayana. These narratives found their way into his art in many forms-as the noble white steed inspired by Ashwamedha and as depictions of scenes from the great epics. This work by Husain is representative of the porousness of the veil separating the mythic from the real in the Indian psyche. Critic Ebrahim Alkazi said of Husain’s easy relationship with mythology, “Husain’s concept is intensely poetic: with a stroke of genius, the entire mythic world which has enriched the minds of the common people is brought vividly alive. Past and present, myth and reality are shown to exist simultaneously in the Indian imagination.” (Ebrahim Alkazi, M F Husain: The Modern Artist & Tradition, New Delhi: Art Heritage, 1978, p. 17)

The bodies run parallel to each other dividing the canvas horizontally into two parts. This understated separation of the picture space is reminiscent of the division of Jain paintings into panels. Each figure occupies one half of the image. While the human figure is one of the most often recurring elements of Husain’s work, an established visual language is not the source of their meaning. Their meaning is generated by the relationship between the elements on the canvas. Artist Jagdish Swaminathan formulated a theory of Husain’s meaning-making in saying, “In Husain’s art, any relationship becomes a significant relationship the moment it is perpetuated in the crucible of the artist’s creativity. A spider, dropping like a clot from the extended finger of a figure in the foreground enters into a mysterious relationship with a lamp standing on the head of another in the back; and at once the quanta of vibrating energy between the two poles become pregnant with meaning.” (“A Metaphor for Modernity: Maqbool Fida Husain”, The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 104) Husain affirmed the singular power of his work to impart meaning to its motifs declaring, “They have no extra-pictorial significance as images. They may be symbolic if the particular relationship is effective because two images when placed together act upon each other. The symbol then derives its life from the energy released.” (“M. F. Husain”, Richard Bartholomew, The Art Critic, Noida: BART, 2012, pp.153-154)

Husain was an intuitive painter: the very act of creation was as important, if not more, than the outcome for him. His works were born of an alchemy of his “thoughts, moods and feelings.” Alkazi noted that Husain’s mode of working led to charged, emotive works of exalted quality. “At its finest and most controlled, this inherent strength invests his paintings with an unselfconscious, spontaneous vitality, blending form, colour, and rhythm into a massive, overpowering whole, which has the sweep and throb of a natural phenomenon.” (Alkazi, p. 3)

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