Important Notice

Since he began to paint in the 1940s, a deep humanism has informed M.F. Husain's creative process. It was only natural then, that the massive loss of life and displacement of people during the Bangladesh liberation movement of 1971, and the devastating floods and cyclone that hit the region the year before, would have a great impact on the artist's conscience and work. In less than a year, between one and three million lives were said to be lost... Since he began to paint in the 1940s, a deep humanism has informed M.F. Husain's creative process. It was only natural then, that the massive loss of life and displacement of people during the Bangladesh liberation movement of 1971, and the devastating floods and cyclone that hit the region the year before, would have a great impact on the artist's conscience and work. In less than a year, between one and three million lives were said to be lost in what some media outlets branded genocide, and over six million people were displaced as refugees. The present lot, painted in 1971, represents Husain's reaction to the devastating images of the crisis, particularly of the mass execution of Bangladesh's intelligentsia including journalists, artists, professors, doctors and writers in places like Rayerbazar, which were circulated in the press at the time.

Speaking about Husain's artistic response to suffering and disaster in the 1970s, Ebrahim Alkazi notes that it underlines the artist's "...capacity to rise to the challenge of a contemporary situation and to transmute the raw emotions of suffering, despair and misery into astonishingly beautiful works of art. Husain does not turn away from the grim realities of death and devastation, but he carefully avoids the pitfalls of morbidity, horror and lachrymose sentiment. There are no clichés in what the eye sees or the heart feels. Both vision and response are startlingly original and overwhelming in their impact" (M.F. Husain: The Modern Artist & Tradition, Art Heritage, New Delhi, p. 37).

Husain revisited this subject on a more philosophical level a few years later in a 1975 series of watercolours titled 'Passage through Human Space'. "Human suffering casts doubts on the prevalence of a beneficent and merciful moral order since so much of the pain inflicted on man baffles reason. In our century, the scale of calculated cruelty and the corresponding depth of suffering has been staggering...Husain's is an image of universal suffering, throughout history and in all its aspects, whether imposed by man or unleashed by nature. It states the tragic theme and at the same time questions its meaning" (Ibid., p. 29).

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