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Lot 80

 

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Born in 1919, Harold Leventhal’s association with India began when he was posted to the country during the Second World War as a member of the Signal Corps. Between 1944 and 1946 Leventhal made many friends in India, especially within the political circles of the Congress Party. Following his return to the United States, Leventhal founded the ‘American Friends of India’ group, and paid several subsequent visits to the subcontinent. It was during... Born in 1919, Harold Leventhal’s association with India began when he was posted to the country during the Second World War as a member of the Signal Corps. Between 1944 and 1946 Leventhal made many friends in India, especially within the political circles of the Congress Party. Following his return to the United States, Leventhal founded the ‘American Friends of India’ group, and paid several subsequent visits to the subcontinent. It was during these visits that he made friends with several artists including M.F. Husain, Jamini Roy and Satish Gujral, organized exhibitions of their work in New York, and built his own substantial archive of modern Indian art.

Leventhal passed away in 2005, leaving his heirs an immense collection of Indian art acquired directly from artists like Husain, of which the present lot was a part. This piece, a study of two faces, speaks of 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 the two share, against a stark green ground. Speaking of the artist’s line, Shiv Kapur notes that “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” (Husain, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, 1961, p. iv).

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