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Maharashtra with M. F. Husain
Portraying India
Maqbool Fida Husain, New Delhi, India, 1981. Getty Images / Sondeep Shanka
With humble beginnings in Pandharpur, a pilgrim town on the banks of the Bhima river in Maharashtra, M.F. Husain grew up largely in the care of his grandfather in Indore. He became a beam of light for his grandson whose lantern and umbrella often resurfaced in M.F. Husain’s paintings later. While Pandharpur evokes memories of the age of innocence for the avant-garde painter, time spent in Indore was an age of revelations and growing maturity. Whenever he got a chance, he would carry his painting gear out to the surrounding countryside to paint the landscape. In one such trip in 1932, he acquired an admirer, N.S. Bendre, the renowned painter, who encouraged him to join the Indore School of Art. This is where he discovered that his paintbrushes could sing on the blank canvas, but didn’t see the course through when he found that he could do what the final year students were doing.
In 1937, he arrived in Bombay. He married here and lived in the same building for 18 years. A self-taught artist, he worked for many years as a sign painter announcing the glories of Bombay Cinema and in 1941, started making toys and furniture designs. These early jobs gave his hand a bold, public style. He used these pop styles created for cinema billboards for his satirical paintings of contemporary society. By 1947, he joined the Progressive Artists’ Group, embracing a new secular language of Indian modernism.
Untitled (Gram Yatra); sourced from Christie’s.
On the right-hand side of the canvas a farmer extends his hand beyond his picture plane, physically and metaphorically holding up the land around him. Women also play a central role in the painting, symbolising creation and renewal of the newly independent country
M.F. Husain rejected the idea of formal art schools and rather taking inspiration from lived experiences. He talks about how in the 1950s he travelled through villages and cities, absorbing patterns from painted walls, wedding courtyards and street festivals. He painted immediately and intuitively, translating what he saw into line and colour without delay. His language translated India’s composite culture into a rich mosaic of colours. On his canvas, the world was simultaneously real, mythical and symbolic. M.F. Husain’s art reflected the world around him, his experiences and his memories of people and places. He often set aside the “isms” of painting, preferring a “child-like” freedom of making.
Much of his subject matter comes directly from Indian life and myth. He painted Indian gods, dancers, farmers and horses again and again. He would say, “My horses, like lightning, cut across many horizon”. His obsession with horses started with the childhood fascination with the paper horses used during Muharram processions. His series on Mother Teresa explored personal themes of the idealised motherhood he lost as an infant. He has painted women in many dimensions: women as Shakti (power), women as Prithvi (Earth), as Prakriti (nature); the all-embracing energy.
The artist moved between mediums. Working on canvas, making films, writing poetry, staging installations and even assembling objects. “Painting is prayer for me,” he said, a state in which he switched off from the rest of the world. In 1967, his first film, Through the Eyes of a Painter, won the Golden Bear at Berlin. He also created art–in–education projects: in 1968 he painted a Ramayana series in an attempt to connect with the people of India, even taking the canvases on a national tour. His 1971 Mahabharata series did something similar, making epics visual and accessible to all. The camera is the painter’s eye and our guide, focusing on the variety of textures in the landscape.
“Send me a snow clad sheet of sky bearing no scar. When I paint, hold the sky in your hands as the stretch of my canvas is unknown to me.”
M.F. Husain was a lover of cities for the city to him represents people, human complexities, and the outcome of human efforts. When it came to cinema, he was highly inspired by Satyajit ray and his portrayal of “essence of the Indian”. A lover of cities, from Mumbai’s alleys to the ghats of Banaras, he was constantly on the move. The National Art Gallery notes he described himself as “a wanderer, a nomad with a brush”. He embraced cinema, music and literature as extensions of his art, and remained engaged with family and community. He enjoyed cooking meals and celebrating birthdays at home, and took pride in being the patriarch of a creative family.
Over decades, major galleries and public collections (including Delhi’s NGMA) acquired his paintings. A number of landmark works, like his 14-foot canvas Zameen (Earth) remain on view at Christie’s Gallery in New York. In recognition of his art, the Indian government awarded him the Padma Shri (1966), Padma Bhushan (1973) and Padma Vibhushan (1991). He passed away in London in 2011 at age 95. Throughout his life, M.F. Husain absorbed the traditions of India, its religions, its various cultures, and restating them in ways to which people responded. In a sense, he lived out his own byword: India itself was a “museum without walls”, and he painted it open. M.F. Husain left behind some 60,000 works of art, each one a fragment of that restless, joyful vision.
To Watch
Through the Eyes of a Painter – an experimental film by M.F. Husain
A Painter of Our Time by Films Division
To Read
Horses of the Sun by M.F. Husain
IN PHOTOS: M.F. Husain, the itinerant artist and flaneur
Husain: Portrait of an Artist by Ila Pal
To Listen
M.F. Husain: Hindustan is Free