Maqbool Fida Husain

Acquired in India, circa early 1970s

Doris Pfeffer (1928 – 2024) was a clinical social worker who conducted a private practice as a psychotherapist and worked as a staff member of the Jewish Board of Family and Children’s Services. She was also a passionate educator, teaching at both New York University and Smith College’s School of Social Work. In 2013, she wrote an autobiography titled Dancing Among Shadows: Memories and Meditation on the Holocaust from an American Childhood and Beyond, describing early memories of Nazi Germany and their effect on her adult life and her research including interviews and discussions with German women. She traveled extensively and was a lover of the arts. Pfeffer met Husain in India and acquired this work.

By the 1960s, Maqbool Fida Husain had gained international recognition through a variety of mediums and worldwide shows. A founding member of Bombay’s Progressive Artists Group, Husain showed his work at the Venice Biennale in 1953 and 1955, and then won the International Biennale Award at the Tokyo Biennale in 1959. He also made his first film in 1967, Through the Eyes of a Painter, which won a Golden Bear Award at Berlin’s annual film festival that year. The 1960s were a fruitful and notable period for Husain where he found success and appreciation for his work. It was also during this time that he reached a maturity in style and his depiction of the human figure, illustrated in Women in Red.

Throughout his oeuvre, Husain also had a marked interest in representing women, particularly rural women. In Women in Red from 1964, the artist depicts three figures joined together in seemingly gentle embraces. The woman to the right has soft facial features which appear to look down at the younger woman, while the yellow figure’s profile is visible with an emphasis on her nose and lips against a blue background. Rendered in bold swatches of color, this painting is a bright depiction of women of older and youthful ages and representative of his vibrant, multi-dimensional brushwork for which he came to be known. Women in Red combines an artistic and structural astuteness, as Husain returns to the composition of three.

'The central concern of Husain's art, and its dominant motif, is woman... Man, in Husain's view, is dynamic only in heroism. He is diminished by confusion and broken by unbelief, and these are unheroic and unbelieving times. Spiritually, woman is more enduring... In Husain's work, woman has the gift of eagerness[...] and an inward attentiveness, as if she were listening to the life coursing within her.' (R. Bartholomew and S. Kapur, Husain, Harry N. Abrams, Inc. Publishers, New York, 1971, p. 46)