Important Notice

Since the late 1940s, when he visited an exhibition of traditional Indian art and craft at Rashtrapati Bhavan in New Delhi, M.F. Husain has painted works related to classical Indian sculpture, music, and dance. Inspired by traditional Indian sculpture, where music and musicians were popular subjects, Husain attempted to capture the multifaceted nature of artistic expression on his canvas.

In these paintings, the artist sought to... Since the late 1940s, when he visited an exhibition of traditional Indian art and craft at Rashtrapati Bhavan in New Delhi, M.F. Husain has painted works related to classical Indian sculpture, music, and dance. Inspired by traditional Indian sculpture, where music and musicians were popular subjects, Husain attempted to capture the multifaceted nature of artistic expression on his canvas.

In these paintings, the artist sought to relate the aesthetics of modern art with the movements of classical Indian dance, the sounds of different Ragas, and the sculpted sensuality of temple carvings. “By celebrating poetry, music and dance in his paintings, Husain reasserts the ancient Indian belief that all arts arise from the same creative source and excellence in one, requires a deep understanding of all the others” (K. Bikram Singh, Maqbool Fida Husain, Rahul and Art, New Delhi, 2008, p. 299).

The present lot, an early portrait of a seated woman playing a sitar, a traditional Indian string instrument, reflects Husain’s commitment to a holistic experience of the arts as well as the mastery he had achieved with line and form by the late 1950s. “Husain wields a quick nervous line of great sensitiveness and energy. It is a versatile line, capable of both power and poetry. It divides his forms in firm definition, broods amongst his grouped figures…It lurks in women’s faces in tender almost tentative hint, or threads sharply across his compositions like a scalpel, separating one figure, one face from the other in subtly differentiated tones of colour, as though he sculpted his figures from paint” (Shiv Kapur, Husain, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, 1961, p. iv).

Another leitmotif that has persisted in Husain’s body of work since his earliest experiments with paint is the female figure. Reflecting his upbringing and early experiences of loss, these figures, like the musician in the present lot, are frequently faceless, as if “…enshrouded in an invisible veil, the simplicity of their form countered by their inaccessibility…They could well be women from his own childhood in a Muslim household, where the feminine presence alternates between the secretive and the visible. The suppressed yearning could be for his mother, who died when he was only two years old, leaving him feeling permanently bereft” (Yashodhara Dalmia, The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2001, p. 111).

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