Important Notice

“Art has to evolve from your very being, like my horses…I see them as ageless and immortal. They draw chariots in the great epics, they stand proudly in the poorest stables, they are embodiments of strength like the dragons of China” (M.F. Husain, Where Art Thou: An Autobiography with Khalid Mohammad, Mumbai, 2002, p. xxii). Across the breadth of Husain’s large body of work, the figure of the horse remains one of his most prevailing and... “Art has to evolve from your very being, like my horses…I see them as ageless and immortal. They draw chariots in the great epics, they stand proudly in the poorest stables, they are embodiments of strength like the dragons of China” (M.F. Husain, Where Art Thou: An Autobiography with Khalid Mohammad, Mumbai, 2002, p. xxii). Across the breadth of Husain’s large body of work, the figure of the horse remains one of his most prevailing and meaningful icons. “The horse as a multidimensional symbolic motif was itself to interest Husain deeply. During his travels in China in 1952 he studied the Sung dynasty renderings of horses. Later, in Europe, where as he found the Renaissance horses unexciting, he was strongly attracted by Franz Marc’s work and Marino Marini’s archaic equestrian sculpture, with its balance between horizontal and vertical lines to achieve a feeling of solitary and monumental anguish. Husain’s own use of the horse motif has been, however more intuitive and complex…[Husain’s horses] are subterranean creatures. Their nature is not intellectualized; it is rendered as a sensation or as abstract movement, with a capacity to stir up vague premonitions and passions in a mixture of ritualistic fear and exultant anguish” (Richard Bartholomew and Shiv Kapur, Husain, Harry N. Abrams Inc., New York, 1972, p. 39, 40). The pairing of human and animal figures, and their various interactions, is another subject that Husain has returned to several times during his extensive career. In the present lot, a large canvas executed in a cool palette of blues and silver, the artist paints a prancing horse between the figures of a man and a woman. Symbolic of both power and grace, virility and passion, the equine form brings balance to this frame, otherwise weighted on the sides by the oppositional male and female priciples.

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