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Lot 2

 

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Early in his career, M.F. Husain travelled around the country visiting several villages and cities, making special note of the country's diverse peoples and art forms. Particularly moved by the way in which the rural women he encountered silently communicated beauty, grace and rhythm in their everyday activities and movements, the artist painted a series of canvases centering on the female form and its inherent beauty.

The present... Early in his career, M.F. Husain travelled around the country visiting several villages and cities, making special note of the country's diverse peoples and art forms. Particularly moved by the way in which the rural women he encountered silently communicated beauty, grace and rhythm in their everyday activities and movements, the artist painted a series of canvases centering on the female form and its inherent beauty.

The present lot, a study of several female faces executed after a trip the artist made to Rajasthan, also illuminates the mastery of line and form that Husain had achieved by the mid 1960s. His bold, yet economical strokes define the features, emotions and the relationship that his subjects share, against an almost monochromatic brownish-green ground.

Speaking of the artist's line, Shiv Kapur notes that he "…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" (Husain, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, 1961, p. iv).

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