MF Husain–"Through the Eyes of a Painter"
“I am an Indian and a painter and that is all,” observed MF Husain. In truth, Maqbool Fida Husain – popularly and professionally known as MF Husain – was arguably the most famous and most successful Indian artist of the 20th century. A number of works by Husain will lead the Modern and Contemporary South Asian Art auction on 4 June in London.
In a career spanning some six decades, Husain rose from painting Bollywood film posters in the 1930s to being lauded for his striking, Cubist-influenced compositions begun following the Partition of 1947. His motifs included landscapes, figurative groups, celebrated figures such as Gandhi and Mother Teresa and, most significantly and repeatedly, horses – created in a modernist style that often saw him described as “the barefoot Picasso of India.”
Marks and Motifs
As a founding member of the mid-century Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group (PAG), Husain was pivotal to the creation of an avant-garde art scene in India. A reaction to the Bengal School, which revived traditional Indian motifs and approaches as a part of a nationalistic mission, Husain and his colleagues set out to intwine Indian subject matter with European and American modes of expression. But he also brought a poetic sensibility to his paintings.
Husain was born in 1915 in Pandharpur, a pilgrimage town in what is the modern-day province of Maharashtra in the central west region of India. Raised in a Muslim family, he learnt calligraphy in his youth and later studied at the Sir Jamsetjee Jeejebhy School of Art in Mumbai. Two of his key motifs originated from his early years: the maternal figure (he lost his mother when he was an infant) and horses, which he would draw in chalk on the walls of his school.
Putting India on the Map
His artistic career began with commercial work, first painting film posters for Bollywood billboards before designing toys for a toy company. Meanwhile, he continued to paint his own pictures and develop his signature style. In 1947, Husain and five other artists, including the painters FN Souza and SH Raza, founded the Progressive Artists Group. Although it existed for less than a decade, and staged only three group exhibitions, the group’s significance was huge: it helped bring Indian modern art to a global audience.
Husain had his first solo show in 1952 in Zurich. As his fame increased, his practice expanded to include watercolour, lithography, serigraphy, tapestries and architecture. He also ventured into film. His monochrome experimental short, Through the Eyes of a Painter, which he shot in 1967 created a cinematic collage of some of his favourite subjects: hawks, goats, women bathing. It won a Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Awards.
Husain cultivated an exotic persona for himself, wielding his long paintbrush and, when abroad, wearing cowboy boots. One critic claimed that he “presented himself as an artist-gypsy.” And he was enamoured of other celebrities, particularly the Indian actress Madhuri Dixit. In 1995, at the India Today Art Gallery in New Delhi, he painted a portrait of the starlet on the side of a living horse. “Husain went mad over Dixit. The press and public went mad over Dixit and the gallery had to call the police to manage the crowds,” noted of Husain’s friends.
“It is modern art. They have not understood. That takes time...”
Husain’s canvases reflected both India’s turmoil – such as the Bhopal gas disaster or the assassination of Indira Gandhi – and its beauty. And his popularity never waned. In 1971, Husain and Picasso were both invited to São Paolo Biennial in Brazil. And, like Picasso in Europe, Husain was known in India by people with no interest in art.
“The rapport that Husain enjoyed with the great Indian public is easily explained. By seizing the most dramatic aspect of a historical moment, he served the popular appetite with the painterly equivalent of a tabloid headline,” noted the Indian art critic and poet Ranjit Hoskote, who curated the retrospective MF Husain: Horses of the Sun at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in 2019.
In later years, however, Husain sparked controversy, following his nude depictions of both Hindu deities and Baharat Mata, the personification of India as a mother goddess. Right-wing commentators called for his arrest and brought legal cases against him for offending religious sensitivities. “It is modern art. They have not understood. That takes time,” Husain countered. Even though Indian courts dismissed the cases against him, the uproar caused him to remain in self-imposed exile, living between Doha and London.
Maqbool Fida Husain, New Delhi, India, 1981. Getty Images/Sondeep Shanka.
Maqbool Fida Husain, New Delhi, India, 1981. Getty Images/Sondeep Shanka.
But Husain was infused with Indian life, and Indian life continued to infuse his work. One of his final projects was a series of large-scale paintings on Indian history. In an interview given just a few years before his death in 2011, aged 95, he was asked if he would ever return to India. “I am already there,” he replied. “I never left my country. “
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