MAQBOOL FIDA HUSAIN | Marathi Women

Acquired from Lalit Kala Akademi, Rabindra Bhavan Galleries, New Delhi, 

R. Bartholomew and S. Kapur, Husain, Harry N. Abrams Inc. Publishers, New York, 1971, illustration pl. 29

G. Kapur, Contemporary Indian Artists, Vikas Publishing House Pvt. Ltd, New Delhi, 1978, illustration pl. 41

G. Kapur, Husain, Vakil & Sons, Mumbai, 1978, illustration p. 128

The current painting belongs to the body of work that Maqbool Fida Husain produced between 1948 and 1951. Other iconic works from this period include Mehndi, Children in a Basket and Dolls Marriage. This was also the time of the formation of the Progressive Artists’ Group.

The style has a strong suggestion of Expressionistic distortion which becomes a hallmark of his later work. Although Husain and the other members of the Progressive Artists Group clearly felt an affinity towards the experience of artist groups like Der Blaue Reiter in Munich, the distortion he adopts appears to be inspired by more immediate and personal concerns. 

The relationship between artist and his childhood is crucial to the understanding of this period of Husain's work. In reference to these early paintings Husain stated, 'my paintings, drawings and the recent paper work has been directly influenced by my experience of traditional Indian dolls, paper toys - shapes galore. The experience of being with them, and the inspiration to create them are inseparable. A painter is a child in his purity of feeling - for only then he creates with authenticity of being.' (M. F. Husain quoted in Ayaz S. Peerbhoy, Paintings of Husain, Bombay, 1955, dust cover). Husain felt that he was searching for a childlike 'purity of feeling' so that he could create truly authentic works, but beyond the desire for purity the toys influence the artist in a more fundamentally artistic manner. In the same way as Picasso is influenced by the abstract forms of tribal art, Husain absorbs the colours and forms of the brightly coloured traditional Indian toys. The works retain the flat planes of colour and slightly stiff postures of the two-dimensional toys but through further experimentation, his own early visual language evolves. 

In 1948, Husain visited the India Independence Exhibition with Francis Newton Souza and was struck by the classical Indian sculpture and traditional miniature painting from the Rajput and Pahari courts. "I deliberately picked up two to 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." (Husain quoted in Nandy, The Illustrated Weekly of India, December 4-10, 1983). These early influences are ripe in this work- the two high breasted and taut female figures are rendered in a Mathura fashion and the flat planes of orange, yellow, brown and red is what he picked up from the Basholi School.

With regard to themes, he mostly painted rural India, which was unlike his other comrades from the Progressive Artists’ Group who chose to paint city life. Renowned critic Geeta Kapur elaborates ‘There is undoubtedly a strong element of romanticism at work in Husain’s impulse to portray rural India… In his tendency to romanticise, he is in line with Amrita Sher-Gil, Jamini Roy and George Keyt… it is Amrita Sher-Gil who shaped the most haunting image of the Indian villager…She made her Indians beautifully dark and emaciated; she showed them immobile, brooding over an everlasting dream. Husain took Amrita’s legacy further towards a more authentic stage. His villagers are not particularly beautiful; but surrounded by their tools, their animals, their magic signs and symbols, they appear more truly alive, secure and rooted in their environment.’ (G. Kapur, 'Maqbool Fida Husain,' Contemporary Indian Artists, Vikas Publishing House Pvt. Ltd, New Delhi, 1978, p. 127)

Kapur has further attributed Husain’s extensive celebrity status to his choice of subjects. 'We should consider the reasons behind Husain’s success story… There is a simple human factor at work: Husain is an endearing person and cuts a romantic figure. But there is the less obvious fact that the content of his art is conducive to widespread popularity… the cultural sociology of post-1947 India, it happened, was on Husain’s side. In the first flush of independence, the intelligentsia concerned with matters of culture was naturally keen to discover and promote indigenous artists... writers… filmmakers. The content of Husain’s art, which mostly comprised traditional, mythological and folk themes, made an immediate appeal, even as his vigorously executed Expressionist idiom carried all the flavour of modernism. He thus became a representative modern artist simultaneously with the foreigners, the Indian elite, and also with the more humble petty-bourgeois who could understand his work at some level…'. (ibid, p. 125)