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Lot 27

 

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Born in 1915, Maqbool Fida Husain was a founding member of the Mumbai based Progressive Artist's Group and remains one of the country's most well known modernists today. A self-taught artist for the most part, Husain's work, since his first exhibition in 1947, has either inspired or accommodated almost all of the trends and traditions that marked the development of modern Indian art over the last half- century.

In the present lot,... Born in 1915, Maqbool Fida Husain was a founding member of the Mumbai based Progressive Artist's Group and remains one of the country's most well known modernists today. A self-taught artist for the most part, Husain's work, since his first exhibition in 1947, has either inspired or accommodated almost all of the trends and traditions that marked the development of modern Indian art over the last half- century.

In the present lot, a large format, montage-like canvas executed in 1991, the artist takes a moment to look back on his expansive body of work and contemplate the past, present, and future, noting generally the state of humankind, and more specifically, the state of his own artistic career and achievements. That this piece comes a year after his seminal Delhi installation, 'Theatre of the Absurd', in which he created a disturbing environment to mirror the unbearable violence, often religious, that had overtaken India at the time, is significant. Yashodhara Dalmia calls this series of works, which explores the identity of the present in search of the source of its troubles, the "apogee" of "Husain's diatribe against violence" saying that these "…large paintings, ranging from twelve to forty feet, also brought together his thematic and stylistic concerns of the past decade" (The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2001, p. 123).

This painting, too, represents a kind of theatre of the absurd. Its tableau of symbols include, from left to right, three factory workers on strike, an empty Etruscan wine jar, a pregnant woman with an olive branch in her hair, a man wearing headgear that bestows him with superpowers, a cawing rooster, and finally, Buster Keaton standing against the face of a large clock in a grey flannel suit. However, the significance of all these symbols and characters, identified by the artist in the catalogue from the 1993 exhibition at the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi, cryptically titled 'Let History Cut across Me without Me', in which this piece was exhibited, is not as clear.

Speaking about this series of epic canvases, Chester Herwitz, possibly Husain's most important patron and collector, noted, "If these powerful pictures are about anything at all, they are about contradiction, contrast, paradox. We must look for the enigma of time/timelessness… violence/sublime… resurrection/destruction… disequilibrium/harmony… sacred/profane… creation/negation… static tension/freedom. Incongruities such as these become whole and coherent by means of Husain's vigorous line, imaginative structure and images as well as vision steeped in awareness of art history" ("Foreword", Let History Cut across Me without Me, Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi, 1993, not paginated).

Also reflected in these works are the skill, product, and scale with which Husain began his foray into the world of art in 1937 - painting cinema billboards. This is evident not only in the monumental size of the work and its ensemble cast of characters, but also in the way in which each of its parts is separately framed and highlighted.

Despite its assertion that the present situation is unbearable, this canvas does come with an undercurrent of hope. Though time can be turned back for no man, there is always the future in which such situations can be turned around for the better. And this better future seems to already be gestating in this work - both in the rooster who screeches out a new dawn, and in the womb of the pregnant woman who has very significantly chosen the olive branch of peace as adornment.

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