Maqbool Fida Husain (b. 1915)

Some areas of thickly applied paint not visible in catalogue illustration. Minor hairline crack in white area of breast of lefthand figure. Vertical stain, faintly visible in catalogue illustration, center left edge would benefit from cleaning and minor conservation. Colors slightly less bright in original than catalogue illustration.
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Executed in the mid-1970s.

'There is an exalted dignity about the people who inhabit Husain's canvases. Peasants, workers, craftsmen, women toiling in fields, or huddled together in conversation all have self contained poise, the stoic patience and grace associated with the common people...he captures in their postures and lineaments their distinctive ethos and culture...not by physiognomy or costume alone are they differentiated, but in their total bearing and presence.' (E. Alkazi, M. F. Husain The Modern Artist and Tradition, New Delhi, p. 22).

From the outset of his career as an artist, Husain's vision has remained based on a deeply entrenched Indian sensibility. In 1948 Husain visited the India Independence Exhibition with F. N. Souza where he saw Gupta sculpture and traditional Miniature painting from the Rajput and Pahari courts. This seemed to be a crystallizing moment in his career, acting as the catalyst for the evolution of his own unique visual vocabulary that combined the palette of the Indian miniature tradition with the voluptuous curves and fluid postures of Indian classical sculpture.

'We went to Delhi together to see that big exhibition of Indian sculptures and miniatures which was shown in 1948...It was humbling. I came back to Bombay and I came out with five paintings, which was the turning point in my life. I deliberately picked up two or three periods of Indian history. One was the classical period of the Guptas. The very sensuous form of the female body. Next, was the Basholi period. The strong colours of the Basholi miniatures. The last was the folk element. With these three combined, and using colors very boldly as I did with cinema hoardings...I went to town...That was the breaking point...To come out of the influence of British academic painting and the Bengal revivalist school...' (Husain in an interview with Pritish Nandy, The Illustrated Weekly of India, December 4-10, 1983).

The main influences on Husain's works are the rural Indian landscape, the classical arts of India and the contemporary folk art of 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. Husain's modernism thus contends with an understanding of Indian aesthetics, the triple axial postures of the central figure in the current painting draws upon the tribhanga posture of Indian sculpture, likewise the rich tones in flat planes of color are reminiscent of Basholi and Kulu paintings while the animal motifs reflect aspects of north Indian folk traditions. Husain states 'One reason why I went back to the Gupta period of sculpture was to study the human form... when the British ruled we were taught to draw a figure with the proportions from Greek and Roman sculpture... in the East the human form is an entirely different structure... the way a woman walks in the village there are three breaks... from the feet, the hips and the shoulder...they move in rhythm... the walk of a European is erect and archaic.' (ibid). Husain has not however merely copied this classical idiom but reworked it into his own unique combination of line and form.

The current work from the mid-1970's reflects the artist's preference for large format  canvases during this period which are less dense than his early oils but no less compositionally complex. The elephant motif on the armband of the central figure is mirrored by the bird held in the raised palm of the standing figure to the left, which are both balanced by the figure of the falling bird in the lower left corner. As Shiv Kapur aptly remarks, 'Husain's metaphor is rich and of great expressiveness. It brings a wide sweep to his way of looking at things, to his many approaches to reality. His symbols and represented objects are often startling in juxtaposition because they are drawn from such far reaches of artistic memory. Dark, intuitive sometimes traditional symbols are cast within contemporary design and given meanings that seem valid for this and every other time.' (Shiv S. Kapur, Husain, Lalit Kala Akademi Series, 1961, p. i).

Kapur goes on further to say, 'Husain wields a quick nervous line of great sensitiveness and energy. It is a versatile line, capable of both power and poetry. It divides his forms in firm definition, broods amongst his grouped figures... It lurks in women's faces in tender almost tentative hint, or threads sharply across his compositions like a scalpel, separating one figure, one face from the other in subtly differentiated tones of colour, as though he sculpted his figures from paint.' (Shiv S. Kapur, Husain, Lalit Kala Akademi Series, 1961, p iv).