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Lot 78

 

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Born in 1915, M.F. Husain, a largely self-taught artist, was a founding member of the Bombay based Progressive Artists’ Group. Since his first exhibition in 1947, Husain’s oeuvre has continued to evolve and engage with various themes and media, and today, may be used as an indicator of the growth and development of modern Indian art.

In the mid 1960s, the artist painted a series of canvases featuring a single faceless woman against a... Born in 1915, M.F. Husain, a largely self-taught artist, was a founding member of the Bombay based Progressive Artists’ Group. Since his first exhibition in 1947, Husain’s oeuvre has continued to evolve and engage with various themes and media, and today, may be used as an indicator of the growth and development of modern Indian art.

In the mid 1960s, the artist painted a series of canvases featuring a single faceless woman against a muted background, of which the present lot is part. In these paintings, like several of his other early works, Husain’s “…women are monumental in their fortitude and yet humble and ordinary in a duality that Husain expresses effortlessly…far from arousing passion, [they] are ascetic without any of the abundant sexuality found in [the] Indian sculptures” that inspired much of his figuration (Yashodhara Dalmia, The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2001, p. 101, 110).

In the present lot, the asceticism Husain achieves through his economic line and grey-brown palette is further emphasized by his solitary subject’s shadowy, featureless face. Linking this quiet anonymity with the artist’s upbringing and early experience of loss, Dalmia notes that “Husain's women are always enshrouded in an invisible veil, the simplicity of their form countered by their inaccessibility. They could well be women from his own childhood in a Muslim household, where the feminine presence alternates between the secretive and the visible. The suppressed yearning could be for his mother, who died when he was only two years old, leaving him feeling permanently bereft” (Ibid., p. 111).

In depicting the nameless subject with one hand placed over her heart, alone under a large, cobalt moon that occupies almost as much of the frame as she does, Husain accentuates the atmosphere of loss and longing in this monumental canvas. In addition, like several other of his early studies of women, here, her figure “…is countered by the gas lamp that stands sentinel to her thoughts. The phallus-shaped lamp has a special significance for Husain as he was brought up by his grandfather Abdul, a lamp-repairer and a tinsmith and his emotional mainstay till his death when Husain was six years old” (Ibid.)

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