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Lot 25

 

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Throughout his career, M.F. Husain has strived to link the language of modern art with the beliefs, traditions and classical arts of India's past. Through his paintings, the artist re-contextualizes and contemporizes the country's ancient tropes and customs, layering them with additional, and often personal, meaning.

Since the early 1950s, Husain's unique modern artistic vocabulary has acknowledged traditional Indian sensibilities,... Throughout his career, M.F. Husain has strived to link the language of modern art with the beliefs, traditions and classical arts of India's past. Through his paintings, the artist re-contextualizes and contemporizes the country's ancient tropes and customs, layering them with additional, and often personal, meaning.

Since the early 1950s, Husain's unique modern artistic vocabulary has acknowledged traditional Indian sensibilities, and, on several occasions, used classical Indian aesthetics as a substrate on which his images could be constructed. "Behind every stroke of the artist's brush is a vast hinterland of traditional concepts, forms and meanings. His vision is never uniquely his own; it is a new perspective given to the collective experience of his race. It is in this fundamental sense that we speak of Husain being in the authentic tradition of Indian art. He has been unique in his ability to forge a pictorial language which is indisputably of the contemporary Indian situation but surcharged with all the energies, the rhythms of his art heritage" (E. Alkazi, M.F. Husain: The Modern Artist and Tradition, Art Heritage exhibition catalogue, p. 3).

In the present lot, titled Devi or goddess, the artist paints the figure of a child in between two seated women. While the woman on the right is rendered in a shadowy palette of grey and sits slightly apart from the group, her counterpart is highlighted in yellow and white, as if illuminated by the sun that she seems to support above her hand. Along with the child that seems to be clinging to her side, another sun, painted on her womb, underscores her fertility and generative power.

The female figure has persisted as one of the leitmotifs in Husain's body of work since his earliest experiments with paint. Reflecting his upbringing and the early loss of his mother, these figures, like those in the present lot, offer straightforward tropes of womanhood, often connected to various ancient Indian myths and beliefs. They are also frequently faceless or devoid of any clear features, 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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