Important Notice

“I needed a certain period from Indian Civilisation, for I wanted to evolve a language right from the beginning. Our own colours, our own forms, and sense of space.” — M F HUSAIN

M F Husain abandoned the academic realism he was trained in early in his career in favour of Cubist-inspired form distortion. Its influence is particularly evident in the flat figuration of the present lot which favours perfectly organising the picture... “I needed a certain period from Indian Civilisation, for I wanted to evolve a language right from the beginning. Our own colours, our own forms, and sense of space.” — M F HUSAIN

M F Husain abandoned the academic realism he was trained in early in his career in favour of Cubist-inspired form distortion. Its influence is particularly evident in the flat figuration of the present lot which favours perfectly organising the picture space over the naturalism of linear perspective. The canvas is centred on a burst of forms. Two female figures are slotted into each other at almost a right angle within this crush. A lion is placed in the lower left quadrant near one of the women. Although some forms are easily discernible, the image on the whole gives the impression of many figures enmeshed in each other, with the tangled mass extending in all directions. Speaking of Husain’s evolving style after his introduction to members and associates of the Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group who were inspired by contemporary European art rather than staid realism, art critic Ebrahim Alkazi said, “We discern the manner in which Husain merges man and landscape, where the human beings take on the contours of rugged hills, rural hamlets, and incorporate in their own shapes the flora and fauna of the countryside.” (Ebrahim Alkazi, The Modern Artist & Tradition, New Delhi: Art Heritage, p. 4)

Woman is the most important motif of Husain’s oeuvre; he returned to it frequently throughout his career. Critic Shiv S Kapur notes the unique spiritual value woman embodied for Husain in saying, “The central concern of Husain’s art, and its dominant motif, is woman... In Husain’s work, woman has the gift of eagerness... like those in ancient Jain miniature paintings, and an inward attentiveness, as if she were listening to the life coursing within her.” (Richard Bartholomew and Shiv S Kapur, Husain, New York: Harry N Abrams, 1972, p. 46)

The women in the present lot possess a sculptural quality resulting from Husain marrying straight angular lines common in Cubist works with the sinuous grace of classical Indian art. A visit to an exhibition of traditional Indian art at the Rashtrapati Bhavan in 1948 proved to be a revelation to the artist. He was profoundly moved by the figuration of Gupta era sculpture and made a conscious choice to use “the grandeur and classicism of Indian tradition” as his formal blueprint. (“A Metaphor for Modernity: Maqbool Fida Husain”, Yashodhara Dalmia, The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 102)

Animals are another recurring motif for Husain. The lion, a vahan or vehicle of the Hindu goddess Durga, is often shown alongside her. Husain, who is well versed with the visual grammar of Hindu mythology, presents the animal without the goddess here. He leverages the associative cultural bond between god and vahan to have the lion represent goddess Durga in this painting. Kapur said of Husain’s interest in the rich Indian tradition of pictorial representation of the divine, “In Indian mythology, gods are inseparable from the animal ‘vehicles’ that express some of their attributes on a more basic plane. In certain cases gods are actually realised in animal form, or are viewed as capable of change from one form to the other, of transformation according to the character of myth. As much as the animal symbol itself, it is the possibility of transfiguration, the protean quality of its image, that is of special interest to the painter.” (Bartholomew and Kapur, 1972, p. 48)

Husain’s rejection of his conventional training in European academic realism and subsequent embrace of traditional Indian art gave rise to the possibility of encountering European art as an equal. His ecumenical enthusiasm for both European modernism and classical Indian sculpture led to a unique style. The works thus produced, “convey, by the brilliance of their colour and the esoteric nature of their imagery, the impression that the artist is depicting the reaches of the introspective eye, that we are being shown the resources of man’s memory from the time of the cave dwellers to the present space age” in the words of art critic Richard Bartholomew. (“M.F. Husain”, Richard Bartholomew, The Art Critic, Noida: BART, 2012, 151)

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