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Lot 21

 

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In the 1950s, in post Independence India, there was a new and added impetus to document and promote the country’s classical arts, with several educational institutes and museums making efforts to link and promote the nation’s rich and varied heritage of painting, sculpture, music, theatre and dance. In Mumbai, for example, “…there was an atmosphere of intense creative interaction between different art forms at the [Bhulabhai] institute that... In the 1950s, in post Independence India, there was a new and added impetus to document and promote the country’s classical arts, with several educational institutes and museums making efforts to link and promote the nation’s rich and varied heritage of painting, sculpture, music, theatre and dance. In Mumbai, for example, “…there was an atmosphere of intense creative interaction between different art forms at the [Bhulabhai] institute that Husain must have imbibed and which must have reawakened his interest in music” (K. Bikram Singh, Maqbool Fida Husain, Rahul & Art, New Delhi, 2008, p. 287).

In addition to the time he spent at the Bhulabhai Institute in Mumbai, Husain travelled around the country visiting several exhibitions of classical Indian sculpture and folk art in the late 1940s and the 1950s. Moved by the way in which these stone and metal figurines silently communicated beauty, grace and rhythm, the artist began to adopt their traditional postures in his figurative works to convey a sense of movement and music. Alongside traditional instruments like tablas, sitars and tanpuras, Husain used these figures to successfully express a sense of music and dance on canvas, such that his viewer’s experience would be the same as a listener’s.

In the present lot, an epic ode to classical Indian music and dance, Husain uses a vivid palette to represent a seated woman, who accompanies the notes she is singing with music from the sitar she strums. The artist inscribes these notes below the figures that dance to their rhythm, trying to capture and convey their sound through the visual medium. The dancers, too, are caught mid-movement, all in the tribhanga or tri-axial position that Husain learnt from the traditional Indian sculpture he encountered on his travels around the country. In what is perhaps a nod to the country’s textile traditions, another time-honored and multifaceted Indian art form, the dancing figures have been posed against the mustard and crimson backdrop of the singer’s shawl.

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