Maqbool Fida Husain (b. 1915)

The Chester and Davida Herwitz Collection

Sotheby's, New York, March 29, 2006 lot 73

Overall good condition. Raised impressions in the background above the figure caused by signature on reverse. Could benefit from restretching. Color slightly deeper than catalogue illustration.
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A staple in Husain's ready oeuvre of metaphor, the umbrella is a theme to which the artist has returned throughout his career in a variety of media – from watercolor to oil on canvas, as well as in his award-winning 1966 film, "Through the Eyes of a Painter". In this short film, an umbrella appears alongside such trademark Husain objects as a lantern, a model tiger, a veiled woman – the proximity of placement suggesting the primacy and poignancy of this object to Husain.

Daniel Herwitz remarks: "Husain's body of work, like a human personality, is stamped by both strongly characterizing traits (pictorial and thematic), and by recurring symbols and attractions. These stylistic continuities play a crucial role in accounting for its identity... Husain's is a search for himself, but also for the resources and style with which to voice his subject: India. The vicissitudes of his work are those of himself and of India itself. His task of being contemporary to India... is one demanding a plasticity of the canvas open to the plasticity of its subject. 

"In order to address the common people, he paints umbrellas rather than painting people directly, in the manner of social realism. In [the Portrait of an Umbrella Series] the lives of ordinary people are evoked through poetic portrayal of an object – the umbrella – which is their metaphor. It, like them, is common and close to hand, yet equally unnoticed and unportrayed. Husain brings these people to life through that symbol: 'the umbrella is the centerpiece, the multitude, yet each person alone.'" (Daniel Herwitz, Husain, Bombay, 1988, p.28)   

In Husain's words:

"It lies folded, the umbrella / Its crumpled black robber slumbers quietly / Its few metal ribs may not respond / To its ageless shadow / Though a thin wooden stem tries to uphold / The burden, of burning streaks of light / Piercing drops of water / Careless widows collide in midair / Shooting down arrows / The ribs tremble: / The black spreads like spilled ink on blotting paper / Images of human voices emerge in black spaces / The voice of squatted toes, twisted, shrunken, and withdrawn / The umbrella lies in its fold / Men, women come and sit around / The umbrella, then slowly turn away."

(MF Husain rpt. Rashda Siddiqui, MF Husain: In Conversation with Husain Paintings, New Delhi, 2001, p.221)