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Lot 74

 

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M.F. Husain first encountered the figure of the horse in the religious stories he was told as a child. It featured in the tales of the Battle of Karbala and Imam Husain the martyr that he heard from his elders at home, as well as those of Ashwamedh, the heroic riderless horse of Hindu epics, that he learnt about at his school in Indore. The artist’s fascination with the animal was further developed during his travels in China and Italy in the... M.F. Husain first encountered the figure of the horse in the religious stories he was told as a child. It featured in the tales of the Battle of Karbala and Imam Husain the martyr that he heard from his elders at home, as well as those of Ashwamedh, the heroic riderless horse of Hindu epics, that he learnt about at his school in Indore. The artist’s fascination with the animal was further developed during his travels in China and Italy in the 1950s, when he came across ancient artistic renderings of horses by painters of the Sung dynasty, and modern ones by artists like Marino Marini, Franz Marc and Pablo Picasso. As Yashodhara Dalmia notes, along with the artist, his horse “…swept across continents, amalgamating various influences into a composite form” yet always remained unique and “singularly his own” (The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2001, p. 107).

In the present lot, the four horses Husain has painted form a furious spiral, their heads, manes and bodies barely discernable in the frenzy of colour and movement. As in his other equine portraits, these horses “…are rampant or galloping; the manes, the fury, the working buttocks, the prancing legs, and the strong neighing heads with dilated nostrils are blocks of color which are vivid or tactile or are propelled in their significant progression by strokes of the brush or sweeps of the palette knife. The activity depicted has been transformed into the action of paint…[They] are subterranean creatures. Their nature is not intellectualized; it is rendered as 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. 20, 43).

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