Important Notice

“With Husain modern art finally arrives in India.” - Shiv S Kapur, Richard Bartholomew and Shiv S Kapur, Husain, New York: Harry N Abrams, Inc., 1972, p. 26)

M F Husain was fascinated by the grandeur of the sagas recounted in ancient epics, creating many works inspired by them. His insatiable curiosity created an oeuvre that drew from a vast array of sources spanning time and cultures. Chester E Herwitz, a distinguished collector... “With Husain modern art finally arrives in India.” - Shiv S Kapur, Richard Bartholomew and Shiv S Kapur, Husain, New York: Harry N Abrams, Inc., 1972, p. 26)

M F Husain was fascinated by the grandeur of the sagas recounted in ancient epics, creating many works inspired by them. His insatiable curiosity created an oeuvre that drew from a vast array of sources spanning time and cultures. Chester E Herwitz, a distinguished collector of modern Indian art, noted Husain’s inclination towards these old stories and his astounding ability to reinterpret them for a modern audience. “It has been a long endeavour of Husain to pictorially engage the epics. To make the epics speak again in contemporary terms. One device he uses in this work is to dramatically shift back and forth in time, intermixing props and figures often with keen wit. A lamppost, dog, prostitute, the biblical David, Leonardo, Eve, Eve’s apple, actors, angels, very great persons and the vilest of all persons all share the same space… It follows then that Husain’s cast of characters are posed in a mute drama articulating silence… in awaiting their fate…” (Chester E Herwitz, “Foreword”, M F Husain, Let History Cut Across Without Me, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 1993)

The present lot alludes to the Trojan War referenced in Homer’s Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid. One of the best-known narratives of Greek mythology, it deals with the war that broke out between the Greeks and the city of Troy after Paris, a prince of Troy, stole away Helen from her husband, the Spartan king Menelaus. After long years of siege, with the soldiers weary and mutinous and a long way from home, Odysseus formulated a plan that would definitively end the war. The Greek soldiers seemingly retreated leaving behind a giant wooden horse as an offering of peace. Giddy with relief, the Trojans pulled the horse in with great pomp as the city erupted into celebration. Once the coast was clear, a number of Greek soldiers emerged from the horse and sacked the city while its guard was down, ending the war once and for all. Husain cuts the horse with an image of Helen so it appears as if she is emerging from the wooden horse. The painting presents a scene that does not exist in the Greek corpus. By associating Helen closely with the horse, Husain deftly condenses the two causes of Troy’s downfall into a single image.

The woman and the horse are two of the most powerful motifs in Husain’s oeuvre. The interplay of the two on Husain’s canvases charges the work with an immense vitality according to writer Shiv S Kapur. He elucidates their potent communion, “...the woman and the horse are compositely rendered as an explosive charge of life… The woman is being carried aloft, seeming to ride the horse symbolically, as though she rode the wind. There would seem to be enough ecstasy of sex in this painting to gather all of life into one headlong apocalyptic image of flight from darkness into darkness.” (Richard Bartholomew and Shiv S Kapur, Husain, New York: Harry N Abrams, Inc., 1972, p. 44)

Although inspired by German Expressionism, his two?dimensional forms owe just as much to long- established traditions of distortion in traditional Indian art like miniature painting. Kapur traces the genealogy of Husain’s forms right back to this native pictorial grammar, clarifying Husain’s astute recognition of the underlying logic of Indian figurative language. “In the classical sculpture and later in the miniature painting, form was perceived as an ideogram, the bearer of a familiar idea or emotion renewed and recharged with meaning in the process of re-creation. Actuality was viewed as no more than the manifest dimension of reality: other dimensions lay hidden behind it, and the natural form in art only hinted at their presence.” (Bartholomew and Kapur, p. 36)

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