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Lot 39

 

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M F Husain held a lifelong interest in film that can be traced back to childhood, when he loved John Ford and Frank Capra. Born to a family of limited means in the small Maharashtrian town of Pandharpur, he moved to Bombay as a young man in 1936 and supported himself as a movie billboard painter. He eventually formed friendships with directors Roberto Rosselini, Ingmar Bergman and Pier Paolo Pasolini. In 1967, he made an experimental short film... M F Husain held a lifelong interest in film that can be traced back to childhood, when he loved John Ford and Frank Capra. Born to a family of limited means in the small Maharashtrian town of Pandharpur, he moved to Bombay as a young man in 1936 and supported himself as a movie billboard painter. He eventually formed friendships with directors Roberto Rosselini, Ingmar Bergman and Pier Paolo Pasolini. In 1967, he made an experimental short film Through the Eyes of a Painter which won the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival.

His keen sensitivity to the scale and grandeur of cinema translated into a sense of epic in his paintings. According to art critic Daniel Herwitz, “His paintings are deeply soaked in the language and feel of films. Even in his most meditative early work, Husain preserves a cinematically displaced sense of action through the image of action. Figures appear in colors subdued or darkened, silhouetted against the eternity of sky or landscape. Such images, in which time seems cast against landscape, are familiar to us from the cinema.” (Dr. Daniel Herwitz, Husain, Tata Press, Mumbai, 1988, p. 26) Critic Geeta Kapur noted the influence of film in “the abrupt and unexpected ways in which he sometimes ‘cuts’ his images in the picture-frame.” (Geeta Kapur, Contemporary Indian Artists, New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1978, p.120)

One of Husain’s series of artworks, That Obscure Object of Desire, of which the present lot is part, was inspired by surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel’s movie of the same name. He began this series immediately after viewing the film. This period of his life was marked by an intense interest in cinema, especially a focussed interest in movie posters. In the 1980s, the same decade as this present lot was made, he also photographed cinema hoardings all over Madras which has a storied street film promotional culture. Film posters formed the basis of his pictorial language for the series. “The works which form part of That Obscure Object of Desire, too, end up with curiously poster-like attributes. Its pictorial look is bold and cinematic, with the look of film posters... Their cinematic qualities extend to the colors which are uniform, brilliant, unbrushed and unbuilt-up in the manner of color in films.” (Dr. Daniel Herwitz, Husain, Tata Press, Mumbai, 1988, p. 26).

This can be seen in the present lot which presents us with a varied cast of characters in different configurations against an indeterminate background. Three figures are foregrounded in conversation, seemingly discussing something that one of the interlocutors is pointing to outside of the frame on the right. On the other end of the canvas, a nude couple walks away with their backs to the viewer. There are many elements present that don’t cohere into one scene: disembodied torso as one of the figures in conversation, a levitating clock, and a lone building that visually separates the couple from the others. This style is typical of a 20th century Indian film poster which would compress and introduce the cast of characters and themes in a single image.

Despite the film being the catalyst for his namesake series, Husain’s intention here was not to make direct painterly representations of the plot. Talking about other works of the series, Herwitz says, “‘Film Star’ and ‘Dacoit’ (Phoolan Devi) were painted at the same time in the style of film posters. Both are about Indian celebrities. ‘Film Star’ is an ironic play on a film poster of India’s most popular film star. His pose is that of preparedness for violence. Obviously the preparation for violence induces violence. Husain is voicing a suspicion about the connection between film, violence and propaganda.” (Herwitz, p. 27). Typical of an artist famous for metabolising an impressive range of influences to create works unique to his sensibilities and preoccupations, Husain uses Buñuel’s work as a springboard for his own meditations.

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