Important Notice

“Varanasi…the city where the essence of true Indian civilization, past and present, throbs alive simultaneously.” - M F HUSAIN

M F Husain was born in 1915 in the small Indian temple town of Pandharpur, about 450 kilometres from Mumbai. At the behest of N S Bendre, he enrolled at the Indore School of Arts in 1932 where he spent a year being formally trained in mediums such as gouache and oil. “He also began to realise that painting... “Varanasi…the city where the essence of true Indian civilization, past and present, throbs alive simultaneously.” - M F HUSAIN

M F Husain was born in 1915 in the small Indian temple town of Pandharpur, about 450 kilometres from Mumbai. At the behest of N S Bendre, he enrolled at the Indore School of Arts in 1932 where he spent a year being formally trained in mediums such as gouache and oil. “He also began to realise that painting was not merely a matter of creating lifelike images. It was a mode of thought in a visual language leading to creation of images that open a window to a different world which we apprehend intuitively but that which we cannot fully grasp with our rational faculties or express through words.” (K Bikram Singh, “A Sulemani From Pandharpur,” Maqbool Fida Husain, New Delhi: Rahul & Art, 2008, p. 30)

Husain’s move to Bombay in 1936, at the age of 19, further expanded his worldview and contributed to his intellectual and artistic growth. In early 1948, at the invitation of F N Souza, he became part of the Progressive Artists’ Group which sought to move away from the academic realism of the British Royal Academy and adopt a form of modernism that acknowledged new developments in the West as well as its roots in traditional Indian art forms. Between 1956 and 1961, Husain began to achieve global recognition and frequently travelled to different parts of the world and exhibited his work. During these extensive travels, he acquired several influences that he integrated into his vast artistic vocabulary. For instance, he further honed his calligraphic skills after meeting artist Chi Pei She in China in 1952 and became acquainted with the works of European masters such as Nolde, Klee, Picasso, Matisse, Cimabue, and Giotto during his visits to France, Switzerland, and Italy.

This global recognition was supported by a continued exploration of experiences that were rooted in Indian subjects, themes, and practices. In the early 1960s, Husain journeyed across Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, and Kerala with his friend and contemporary, Ram Kumar. These travels produced a large repository of images and motifs that would imbue his canvases with symbolic meaning and emotive content. The artist remarked, “If in 1948 I saw the quintessence of Indian art in Delhi, in Benares I saw the essence of India. At the level of thought, this left a very deep impression.” (Ila Pal, “Maria, the New Beginning,” Husain: A Portrait of an Artist, Noida: HaperCollins Publishers India, 2017, p. 60)

Though most of Husain’s works from the 1950s and 1960s were largely figurative, he occasionally deviated from this focus and created landscapes and cityscapes in oil, sketch pen, colour pencil and crayon, as he used to during his boyhood years in Indore. The present lot was painted in the 1960s and likely influenced by his first visit to Varanasi with Ram Kumar. The two artists stayed at the home of writer Premchand’s son, Shripad Rai, and explored the city and its ghats together. Reminisces Kumar, “We would part in the mornings and go in different directions and meet only in the evening and show our sketches and drawings of the day to each other. At the end of our stay, we spread all of them out on the floor to get an idea of what we had been doing those ten days.” (Meera Menezes, Ram Kumar: Traversing the Landscapes of the Mind, Mumbai: Saffronart, 2016, p. 191)

The fortnight Husain spent with Ram Kumar in Varanasi left a profound impact on him. Recalling their experience watching the dead be cremated at Manikarnika Ghat, he said, “To our dismay, we found ourselves crying at the spectacle. By afternoon, the incredible spirit of revelry to which we had remained oblivious began to impinge upon our consciousness. Every new body for cremation was accompanied by the sound of shehnai and fireworks, bringing home the inescapable truth that sadness and suffering were of our own making, while the celebration around was the real Benares. For here the soul was finally freed from the cycle of birth, death and suffering.” (Pal, p. 60)

Painted in an expressionist style emphasised by bold, flowing lines, the present lot demonstrates Husain’s mastery of linework, which he had developed during his days in Indore as well as the period when he painted hoardings in Bombay at the beginning of his career in the late 1930s. Observes art critic Yashodhara Dalmia, “...it was the line that was Husain’s strongest element and he used it with a bounding energy in his work.” (Yashodhara Dalmia, “A Metaphor for Modernity,” The Making of Modern Indian Art, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, p. 109) Here, the artist uses earthy browns and blue-green tones rendered in heavy, gestural brushstrokes to suggest a feeling of movement. Through a fluid combination of form and line, he imbues the canvas with a sense of timelessness.

Remarks author and artist Ila Pal, “His manner of speaking through his art was honest, yet not populist. What he read, the wider truths he grasped, did not hinder the directness of his depictions of life. Perhaps therein lies the reason why Husain’s art remained the most significant bridge between the common man and contemporary art. His paintings seductively led a viewer through familiar lanes and left him a little further; a little farther than he had ever ventured. This was the most important contribution Husain made towards the appreciation of contemporary art.” (Pal, p. 116)

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