Maqbool Fida Husain (b. 1915)

Painting would benefit from a light clean, paint shrinkage apparent on black tale of horse; otherwise canvas appears to be in good overall condition. Browns of original slightly darker tones than catalogue illustration.
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'Art has to evolve from your very being, like my horses... I see them as ageless and immortal. They draw chariots in the great epics, they stand proudly in the poorest stables, they are embodiments of strength like the dragons of China.' (M.F. Husain with Khalid Mohammed, Where Art Thou, Mumbai, 2002, p. xxii).

Husain has had a fascination with horses from an early age. As a young boy his grandfather used to take him to the local farrier in Indore where he saw horses of all types: the thoroughbreds, the polo ponies, the cavalry horses and the common horse that pulled the local carts.  As an artist Husain has returned to the subject of the horse repeatedly in his work, his horses are wild, symbols of immense raw power, the raised hooves and heaving flank all suggestive of their pent up primal energy.  Over many decades the local horses of Husain's childhood and those from myth and legend have become the building blocks for one of the artist's most enduring themes.

'The horses are rampant or galloping; the manes, the fury, the working buttocks the prancing legs, and the strong neighing heads with dilated nostrils are blocks of color which are vivid or tactile or are propelled in their significant progression by strokes of the brush or sweeps of the palette knife. The activity depicted is transformed in the activity of paint.' (E Alkazi, M. F. Husain The Modern Artist and Tradition, New Delhi, 1978, p. 3).

In 1952 Husain visited China where he studied the Sung dynasty's depiction of horses in ceramic and met with the painter Chi' Pai-shih. Chi' Pai-Shih was known for his monochromatic paintings of animals with their minimalistic use of line to acheive form and movement and this condensing of form is what inspired Husain. In a recent conversation Husain admitted that he felt that challenge in art remained in creating forms in the simplest manner possible and undoubtedly the style of the current work appears to be very strongly influenced by oriental scroll paintings. In the lower right corner Husain has signed the work Hu shan translated as 'lake mountain,' in the manner of a Chinese seal, providing an east -Asian slant to part of his cycle of horse paintings.  'To Husain the act of painting seems more important and vital than the completed work. And so it happens that the totality of a particular concept is explored and projected through an extended cycle of works... Apparently incomplete, the single work reveals its logic and relevance when seen as one stage in a continuum, an integral part of a larger and ever-expanding whole.' (E. Alkazi, M. F. Husain: The Modern Artist and Tradition, New Delhi, 1978, p. 3).