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Lot 25

 

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Unseen since its debut at a 1950 exhibition of works by members of the Progressive Artists' Group in Bombay, this early painting offers rare insight into the artist's formative period, underscoring the early crystallization of his artistic strengths and the idiom that would soon come to define his body of work.

Speaking about his work from the early 1950s, Ayaz S. Peerbhoy, the artist's first biographer, notes, "Husain's paintings... Unseen since its debut at a 1950 exhibition of works by members of the Progressive Artists' Group in Bombay, this early painting offers rare insight into the artist's formative period, underscoring the early crystallization of his artistic strengths and the idiom that would soon come to define his body of work.

Speaking about his work from the early 1950s, Ayaz S. Peerbhoy, the artist's first biographer, notes, "Husain's paintings show a keen sense of design. This he has inherited from his early pre-occupation with calligraphy...The vigorous strokes in his early work are a positive indication of his strength in drawing and mastery of line. Design is a balance of two contradictory lines, the vertical and the horizontal. By balancing of these lines is achieved the architectonic arrangement of space" (Paintings of Husain, Thacker & Co., Mumbai, 1955, not paginated).

In the present lot, painted the same year that Husain held his first one-man show in Bombay, the artist arranges his motley cast of human and animal figures in the four sections created on the surface by the stark diagonals that cross it from corner to corner. This structure perhaps references the mirrored construction of the common playing card illustrations from which Husain has also borrowed an entire suite of characters. Presiding over the colourful scene is the bearded King of Hearts, holding his sword aloft. To his right is his Queen, holding a flower, and between them a heart, the symbol of their suite. Their son, Jack of Hearts, is painted below them. Joining the family are a horse and an elephant, also painted in profile, and similarly emblematic of royalty and power.

Recalling childhood games and rhymes as well as wooden animal toys, this painting is "...reminiscent of the toys which were [Husain's] childhood companions, but created on a different level of consciousness. The dolls have grown into full maturity and shed their clay bodies, to become a pattern of colour and harmony. The colours are bold and contrasted in a balance to deepen the mystery of form" (Ibid.). Husain also noted that these early works were "...directly influenced by my experience of traditional Indian dolls, paper toys - shapes galore. The experience of being with them, and the inspiration to create them are inseparable. A painter is a child in his purity of feeling - for only then he creates with authenticity of being" (Ibid.).

During the 1940s and 50s, a large part of the support for artists and the arts in India came from foreign émigrés, diplomats and expatriates like Emanuel Schlesinger, Rudolf von Leyden and Walter Langhammer. This particular painting was acquired by one of Husain's American patrons, Leslie Albion Squires, who was at the time serving as Vice Consul at the American Consulate in Bombay. Squires went on to serve as the American Consul General in East Pakistan, and the Cultural Attaché and Director of the United States Information Service (USIS) at the American Embassy in Islamabad in the 1970s.

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