Maqbool Fida Husain b. 1915 Untitled

The main influences on Husain’s early works are the rural Indian landscape, the classical arts of India and the contemporary culture of urban India.  Husain’s paintings throughout his career reflect an ongoing dialogue between the artist and these influences.  The strength of Husain’s vision is that he can blend such divergent stimuli into coherent and immediately tangible forms that are neither cerebral nor superficial.

Between 1960 and 1965 Husain created several paintings of Rajasthan, the region was also the inspiration for his first film Through the Eyes of a Painter.  ‘It’ll be shot in three cities of Rajasthan. It’ll be about the bathing nymphets of Bundi lake, the brave Rajput warriors of Chittor Fort, the golden by lanes and the caravanserais of Jaiselmer,’ (M F Husain with Khalid Mohammed, Where art thou, Mumbai 2002, p. 104.) The current work from a similar period is also clearly influenced by the landscape forts and walled cities of Rajasthan.    

‘Behind every stroke of the artists brush is a vast hinterland of traditional concepts, forms, meanings.  His vision is never uniquely his own; it is a new perspective given to the collective experience of his race.  It is in this fundamental sense that we speak of Husain being in the authentic tradition of Indian Art.  He has been unique in his ability to forge a pictorial language, which is indisputably of the contemporary Indian situation but surcharged with all the energies, the rhythms of his art heritage.’ (E. Alkazi, M F Husain The Modern Artist and Tradition, New Delhi, p.3)