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Lot 42

 

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In the 1950s, in post Independence India, there was a new and added impetus to document and promote the country’s classical arts, with several educational institutes and museums making efforts to link and promote the nation’s rich and varied heritage of painting, sculpture, music, theatre and dance. In Mumbai, for example, “…there was an atmosphere of intense creative interaction between different art forms at the [Bhulabhai] institute that... In the 1950s, in post Independence India, there was a new and added impetus to document and promote the country’s classical arts, with several educational institutes and museums making efforts to link and promote the nation’s rich and varied heritage of painting, sculpture, music, theatre and dance. In Mumbai, for example, “…there was an atmosphere of intense creative interaction between different art forms at the [Bhulabhai] institute that Husain must have imbibed and which must have reawakened his interest in music” (K. Bikram Singh, Maqbool Fida Husain, Rahul & Art, New Delhi, 2008, p. 287).

In addition to the time he spent at the Bhulabhai Institute in Mumbai, Husain travelled around the country visiting several exhibitions of classical Indian sculpture and folk art in the late 1940s and the 1950s. Moved by the way in which these stone and metal figurines silently communicated beauty, grace and rhythm, the artist began to adopt their traditional postures in his figurative works to convey a sense of movement and music. Alongside traditional instruments like tablas, sitars and tanpuras, Husain used these figures to successfully express a sense of music and dance on canvas, such that his viewer’s experience would be the same as a listener’s.

In the present lot, a large, elongated work on canvas, Husain depicts a group of musicians on the right rendered in tonal variations of brown, in which each member seems inextricably linked with the others through the rapture of performance. A prominent sitar and a gesturing palm in white heighten the drama of this group. Creatively playing with space, Husain divides these musicians from the rest of the canvas using an abstract blue orb. Beyond it, the artist has painted two dancers in the classical tribhanga or tri-axial pose, separated from the musicians but engaged by their melodies. Although it seems to be divided into three separate narratives, this composition comes together with a simple dark band that unites its elements, and also emphasizes its striking horizontality.

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