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Lot 55

 

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“All forms of art are born from one’s roots.” - M F HUSAIN

M F Husain has earned a significant position in the canon of Indian art by establishing a new idiom in modernism that was contemporary in its outlook and yet in its essence grounded in classical Indian art, mythology, and Indian life. He became, in art historian Yashodhara Dalmia’s words, “a legend in his lifetime, a man who delivers the common man from the ordinariness of... “All forms of art are born from one’s roots.” - M F HUSAIN

M F Husain has earned a significant position in the canon of Indian art by establishing a new idiom in modernism that was contemporary in its outlook and yet in its essence grounded in classical Indian art, mythology, and Indian life. He became, in art historian Yashodhara Dalmia’s words, “a legend in his lifetime, a man who delivers the common man from the ordinariness of his existence to the international arena. He was, at the same time, involved with language, with the formulation of modernity and with its rootedness in India. (Yashodara Dalmia, “A Metaphor for Modernity: Maqbool Fida Husain,” The Making of Modern Indian Art, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001, p.101)

Husain studied at the J J School of Art, Bombay, in the 1930s but was forced to cut short his education due to financial constraints. He found employment painting cinema billboards before joining Fantasy-a family-run business in South Bombay that made nursery furniture-as head of design between circa 1942 and 1949. Many of his initial illustrations, which were to be used as templates for designs for the studio’s furniture, referenced Western popular culture such as Disney films, nursery rhyme characters, and Hummel figurines. However, he later expressed an ardent desire to explore themes that were geographically and culturally closer to India and began to create designs based on Indian villages and folklore. “In presenting an Indian pastoral, these designs take their place amidst a long tradition in the visual and literary history of the region. They also mark the beginning of Husain’s sustained engagement with the village in his own practice.” (Mortimer Chatterjee, “World-Making: Husain at Play, in the Village,” Fantasy: M F Husain - Nursery Design and an Emerging Indian Aesthetic, Mumbai: Minal and Dinesh Vazirani, 2023, p. 107)

He went on to join the Progressive Artists’ Group, founded by his friend and mentor F N Souza in 1947, the same year that India won independence. The group was short-lived but its impact immense as it shaped the identity of Indian modernism both nationally and globally, combining influences from traditional Indian and folk art and emerging movements in the West to create a new mode of expression.

The present lot is a monumental canvas spanning nearly eight feet. It was painted in 1958, during a significant phase of the artist’s early career. During the 1950s, he produced several iconic works and won international recognition at the 1954 Venice Biennale and exhibitions at Zurich, Prague, Frankfurt, and Rome. Like many of his canvases from this decade, such as the award-winning Zameen (1955), the work draws its subjects from ordinary life and presents a romanticised depiction of rural India. Geeta Kapur remarks, “Husain, for all the diversity of his life and art, has attempted to locate himself, to keep in touch with the sources of Indian life scattered in myriad forms… From the perspective of a city, particularly a chaotic city such as Bombay where [he] started his career in squalid conditions, the village appears like a utopia.” (Geeta Kapur, “Maqbool Fida Husain,” Contemporary Indian Artists, New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House Pvt Ltd, 1978, pp. 126-127)

The present lot demonstrates Husain’s strong command over line and colour and illustrates the new style he developed during the 1950s, which blended simple classical and folk forms and flat planes of bold colour. “He drew from the classical, the miniature and folk and attempted to meld them into a language which formulated the present. It allowed him to express a perceived reality which while being seamless, mythical and vast was at the same time hurtling towards industrialization and modernization.” (Yashodhara Dalmia, “M F Husain: Re-inventing India,” M F Husain: Early Masterpieces 1950s-70s, London: Asia House Gallery, 2006) In the large coloured panel at the upper right, which can be viewed as a painting in itself, he brings together idyllic vignettes of village life-a group of farmers with a plough, women drawing water from a well, a group of women relaxing under some trees, and a woman milking a cow. The earthy palette of green, ochre, brown, red, and orange reveals the influence of Basohli and Pahari paintings which, alongside Gupta sculptures, had fascinated Husain when he first saw them at the 1948 Viceregal exhibition at Rashtrapati Bhavan in Delhi. The “classical poise” of the figures in this panel and in the bold line drawings to the left “sheds them of all sentimentality and imbues them with a quiet gravity.” (Dalmia, 2001, p. 106)

In his explorations of quotidian village life in the decade that followed Indian independence, Husain joined a robust lineage of early modern Indian artists, such as Amrita Sher-Gil and Jamini Roy, who like him were enamoured with rural India. Geeta Kapur observes that while Sher-Gil “lent the villagers her own romantic consciousness, her melancholy, as a token, perhaps of her sympathy with them... Husain took Amrita’s legacy further towards a more authentic stage. His villagers are not particularly beautiful; but surrounded by their tools, their animals, their magic signs and symbols, they appear more truly alive, secure and rooted in their environment.” (Kapur, p. 127) While in depicting farmers, Husain could be alluding to the crucial position they hold as the backbone of a largely agrarian nation, he “does not put the onus of humanity on the peasant’s shoulders but shares with them... a sense of camaraderie…” and demonstrates “a spontaneous affinity with his subjects.” (Kapur, p. 128)

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