Important Notice

Several motifs have been associated with M F Husain over the course of his career, with the horse being the most well-known. Among others, the bird often shows up in his oeuvre. The present lot, made in the tumultuous years following the assassination of Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1984, shows a magnificent white bird taking flight with a red rose in its mouth against a wash of grey. The eyes rest on the iridescent white of the bird... Several motifs have been associated with M F Husain over the course of his career, with the horse being the most well-known. Among others, the bird often shows up in his oeuvre. The present lot, made in the tumultuous years following the assassination of Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1984, shows a magnificent white bird taking flight with a red rose in its mouth against a wash of grey. The eyes rest on the iridescent white of the bird and the red of the rose as some of the only points of colour on an otherwise muted canvas.

Today, the white dove is the universal symbol of peace. It also symbolises the Holy Spirit for Christians. Husain, who drew deeply from Indian mythology, would not have been unfamiliar with the importance of birds in its legends. The god of love, Kamadeva, is usually depicted with birds as his vahana. The noble Garuda serves as the vahana of Vishnu while his nephew Jatayu is valorised for aiding Ram in his search for his kidnapped wife Sita. Playing with a number of cultural references but sticking consistently to none, Husain created new meanings for his motifs with each work. As the art critic Richard Bartholomew puts it, “When we look at these creatures we must remember that the animal is not the subject of Husain’s painting; it is the daemonic principle that he depicts, and to him it is neither good nor bad… So too does the hawk, the cactus, or, again, the horse. In series after series Husain has put these images together in varying juxtaposition. Perhaps the general inference is the same; yet each successful work is a different painting with a province of feeling determined by the construction, by the poetic premise of the composition. The subject may be the same, but the revelation each time is different.” (Richard Bartholomew and Shiv S Kapur, Husain, Hyderabad: Cinema Ghar, 2006, p. 20-21)

Husain himself has stated that he organises his pictorial space such that meaning is generated through the interaction of the various elements-in this case through the pairing of bird and flower. He employs the visual shorthand of many traditions that his viewer would be familiar with but ultimately does not rely solely on these codes for meaning-making. Speaking of his motifs he has said, “They have no extra-pictorial significance, as images or symbols. They may be symbolic if the particular relationship is effective-because two images when placed together act upon each other. The symbols then derives its life from the energy released.” (The artist as quoted in Bartholomew and Kapur, p. 20-21)

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