Important Notice

“[Cinema is the only] complete art form without which I would have considered myself a worthless artist. Cinema is the ultimate, it is easily the most modern and magical medium of expression.”
- M F HUSAIN

Cinema was an obsession and an inspiration for M F Husain. In his biography, Husain: Portrait of an Artist, he recalls how as a child he was permitted to watch films only twice a year, and so he would often slip away... “[Cinema is the only] complete art form without which I would have considered myself a worthless artist. Cinema is the ultimate, it is easily the most modern and magical medium of expression.”
- M F HUSAIN

Cinema was an obsession and an inspiration for M F Husain. In his biography, Husain: Portrait of an Artist, he recalls how as a child he was permitted to watch films only twice a year, and so he would often slip away from his evening art classes to catch a movie instead. When he moved to Bombay as a young man in 1936, he took up a job painting movie billboards to earn a living. He admired the works of auteurs Federico Fellini, Luis Buñuel, and Ritwik Ghatak, and later formed friendships with directors Roberto Rossellini, Ingmar Bergman, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Satyajit Ray. The films he watched often formed the basis of his artwork. His 1980s series That Obscure Object of Desire, for example, contains metaphors for themes of obsession and longing, which Buñuel explored in his 1977 movie of the same name. Many canvases also pay tribute to Satyajit Ray films such as Pather Panchali and Shatranj Ke Khiladi.

Husain forayed into filmmaking in 1967 with Through the Eyes of a Painter, an experimental short film that won the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival that year. Three decades later, in 1998, he began shooting his first feature film, Gaja Gamini, which is referred to in the present lot. The subject of the work is the blind singer Sangeeta, one of the multiple archetypes of the ideal woman played by actor—and Husain’s long-time muse-Madhuri Dixit in the film. Remarks Geeti Sen, “Gaja Gamini: she who walks with the grace and the gait of an elephant is a classical concept, a leitmotif through the film. Yet Husain’s creation challenges traditional notions of the woman who is not home-bound here but independent and a wanderer.” (Geeti Sen, “Gaja Gamini: The Act of Transformation,” The Genesis of Gaja Gamini, Ahmedabad: H2A Graphics International, 2000, p. 176)

The present lot, which was drawn during the last decade of Husain’s career, fuses the diverse influences and themes that make up his vast oeuvre. As one of the founding members of the Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group he pioneered a form of Indian modernism that challenged British academic realism and the Revivalist art movement of Bengal that were prevalent during the beginning of his career. From the 1950s onwards, he travelled extensively across India, China, and Europe, assimilating various styles and techniques that he encountered. The pastoral setting of the drawing echoes the artist’s preoccupation with rural India, especially in his works of the 1950s. The lyrical form of the woman sitting under a tree and playing the harmonium evokes the sensuousness of classical Indian sculptures, which had greatly fascinated Husain since the 1940s. In declining to give her face any defining features, he uses its anonymity to suggest a universal woman who could embody various archetypes such as the mother, lover, and muse.

As art critics Richard Bartholomew and Shiv Kapur have observed, “The central concern of Husain’s art, and its dominant motif, is woman… Spiritually, woman is more enduring. Pain comes naturally to her, as do compassion and a sense of birth and death of things. In Husain’s work, woman has the gift of eagerness […] and an inward attentiveness, as if she were listening to the life coursing within her.” (Richard Bartholomew and Shiv S Kapur, Husain, New York: Harry N Abrams, Inc, 1971, p. 46)

Husain uses fluid, masterful strokes and bold colours emotively to craft a poetic narrative. These stylistic choices recall his engagement with calligraphy and Jain and Basohli miniature paintings, as well as the influence of European masters such as Henri Matisse and Paul Klee. Art historian Yashodhara Dalmia asserts, “Above all else, it was the line that was Husain’s strongest element and he used it with a bounding energy in his work.” (Yashodhara Dalmia, “A Metaphor for Modernity,” The Making of Modern Indian Art, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 109)

Throughout his oeuvre, Husain crafted a diverse pictorial language that traversed the mundane and the metaphysical, often in the same canvas. “While his paintings do have an immediate social context, the essential concern of his art is archetypal: it explores the parables of life, love, and death… Husain’s human figures are, therefore, reared in a field of magical signs and symbols, amid rich metaphors that make connections bridging the elisions between different planes of reality.” (Bartholomew and Kapur, p. 58) The bull that the woman rests against in the present lot is closely associated with images of rural India and simultaneously represents the Nandi bull, Shiva’s sacred vehicle and a symbol of strength and devotion. The lamp seen on the right appears as a symbol in many of Husain’s works, notably Between the Spider and the Lamp (1956). While its origins are rooted in memories of his grandfather Abdul Husain who was a lamp maker, here it suggests a move from helplessness to self-assertion and independence as it alludes to a pivotal scene in the film in which Sangeeta leads a group of women on a protest to make their voices heard.

Layered with all the essential elements of Husain’s oeuvre, the present lot is a remarkable celebration of beauty and painterly form, and a fine example of his ability to metamorphosize his experiences to create art that was uniquely expressive of his own vision.

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