Important Notice

Here, Husain favours an earthier, muted palette over the vibrant colours for which he is often known. Set against a loosely articulated green ground that offers little sense of place, the solitary figure occupies almost the entire pictorial field, reinforcing her self‒contained presence. As Kapur observes, Husain’s female figures are “deliberately unalluring and even grave in their simple, natural beauty.” (Kapur, p.135)

Throughout... Here, Husain favours an earthier, muted palette over the vibrant colours for which he is often known. Set against a loosely articulated green ground that offers little sense of place, the solitary figure occupies almost the entire pictorial field, reinforcing her self‒contained presence. As Kapur observes, Husain’s female figures are “deliberately unalluring and even grave in their simple, natural beauty.” (Kapur, p.135)

Throughout Husain’s oeuvre, the hands are among his most expressive motifs. Geeti Sen observes that they become “an encrypted language”, carrying emotional and symbolic meaning across his work. (Geeti Sen, “The Hands of Husain”, India International Centre Quarterly, Vol. 45, No. 2, 2018, p. 50) From the broad, webbed hands of Between the Spider and the Lamp, which Yashodhara Dalmia describes as rooting the figures “firmly to the earth”, to the present lot, they remain central to Husain’s articulation of the human figure. Their stillness echoes Geeta Kapur’s description of the paintings of this period as enacting “a drama, abstracted from life, told in silent gesture; through direction of hands, the staring gaze, the awkward slant of the body.” (Kapur, p. 39) It is perhaps this inward concentration that Richard Bartholomew and Shiv S Kapur evoke when they write: “Spiritually, woman is more enduring. Pain comes naturally to her, as do compassion and a sense of the birth and death of things. In Husain’s work, woman has the gift of eagerness, often expressed in... 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, Inc, 1971, p. 46)

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