Important Notice

“We had wiped out the Western influence...We went back to our roots. We discarded all outside influences. We painted contemporary things but put in our context and in our culture.”
- M F HUSAIN

Despite his early training in art promoting Western techniques and styles, M F Husain gravitated towards traditional Indian art in his search for a new Indian artistic identity. As a member of the Progressive Artists’ Group in the wake of... “We had wiped out the Western influence...We went back to our roots. We discarded all outside influences. We painted contemporary things but put in our context and in our culture.”
- M F HUSAIN

Despite his early training in art promoting Western techniques and styles, M F Husain gravitated towards traditional Indian art in his search for a new Indian artistic identity. As a member of the Progressive Artists’ Group in the wake of Independence, Husain and his fellow artists looked to those styles and movements which previously flourished in India and had since been neglected in their colonial education. A visit to the landmark exhibition of traditional Indian art and sculpture held in New Delhi in 1948 had a far-reaching impact on his work. Being exposed at large to the grace and technical mastery of classical sculptures and miniatures moved him to incorporate elements of these styles into his own. Of this he has said, “We [Husain and Souza] went to Delhi together to see that big exhibition of Indian sculptures and miniatures which was shown in 1948… It was humbling. I came back to Bombay and in 1948 I came out with five paintings, which was the turning point of my life. I deliberately picked up two or three periods of Indian history. One was the classical period of the Guptas. The very sensuous form of the female body. Next, was the Basohli period. The strong colours of the Basohli miniatures. The last was the folk element.” (The artist as quoted in Dr. Daniel Herwitz, Husain, Mumbai: Tata Press, 1988, p. 18) In the seven years following 1948, Husain’s travels made him well acquainted with Jain and Basohli miniatures and Mathura sculptures.

The present lot revisits Husain’s rural themes: two figures sit atop cattle against a mosaic of flat planes of green, orange, yellow and brown, colours commonly found in the Indian countryside. The bull, coloured in with broken up planes of green and brown, is being directed by the man in a blue dhoti while the woman with him looks straight ahead. The three figures rendered in two-dimensional forms, especially the woman shown in profile, evoke the figuration of the Indian miniatures that Husain was so affected by. While the Expressionists, who influenced the members of the Progressive Artists’ Group, were also known for their rejection of realism, art critic Shiv Kapur asserts that such “emotive distortion” was an accepted feature of Indian miniature painting where “form was perceived as an ideogram, the bearer of a familiar idea or emotion renewed and recharged with meaning in the process of re-creation.” (Richard Bartholomew and Shiv S Kapur, Husain, New York: Harry N Abrams Inc, 1972, p. 36)

The couple’s jutting shoulders and visually striking waists cut figures that are distinctive from the depiction of the human form in the Western canon. Husain drew deeply from classical Indian sculpture as he believed it offered a blueprint to more ably represent the particular harmony of the Indian form than any Western art style could. “One reason why I went back to the Gupta period of sculpture was to study the human form…when the British ruled we were taught to draw a figure with the proportions from Greek and Roman sculpture...that was what I thought was wrong…in the East the human form is an entirely different structure…the way a woman walks in the village there are three breaks...from the feet, the hips and the shoulder...they move in rhythm...the walk of a European is erect and archaic.” (The artist as quoted in Herwitz, p. 22) Indian sculptures became the bedrock of Husain’s understanding of the female form for the rest of his career. In the present lot the woman bears many of Husain’s markers of Indianness-the allegiance to rural India through her proximity to cattle, the red and blue draped Indian attire and the “energy and dynamism” which she owes to the “high-breasted and taut figure of Mathura sculpture.” (Bartholomew and Kapur, pp. 36-38)

Husain’s assembly of elements from India’s rich cultural past in order to create a new Indian identity for a young country is not merely an exercise in cultural retrieval but an attempt to produce a new style of art, one that is steeped in its roots and can as easily absorb influences from without as a result.

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