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Lot Essay
Most artists have been attracted at one time or other to the charm and colour of the Indian countryside and drawn inspiration from it. Few have brought to it the poetic lyricism which Husain has. Here the sight of a simple country cart sets him off on a journey, a pilgrimage ('yatra') into the time and world of ancient myth
- Ebrahim Alkazi, 1978
Maqbool Fida Husain is widely regarded as the most renowned figure in the story of modern Indian art. The high-profile, charismatic artist pioneered an energetic and innovative style uniquely his own, in his quest to establish what it meant to be a modern artist in India. Drawing inspiration from Indian classical art, both miniature painting and sculpture, and combining that with the expressionist dynamism of Western modernism, Husain created an aesthetic that remains instantly recognizable. In the decade following India’s independence in 1947, Husain presented a new modern art for a new modern India. As the collector, gallerist and historian Ebrahim Alkazi elegantly encapsulated in his monograph on the artist, “behind every stroke of the artist's brush is a vast hinterland of traditional concepts, forms, meanings. [Husain’s] vision is never uniquely his own; it is a new perspective given to collective experience of his race [...] Husain’s concept is intensely poetic: with a stroke of genius, the entire mythic world which has enriched the minds of the common people is brought vividly alive. Past and present, myth and reality are shown to exist simultaneously in the Indian imagination” (E. Alkazi, M. F. Husain: The Modern Artist & Tradition, New Delhi, 1978, p. 17).
Untitled (Gram Yatra) (the Volodarsky Husain) epitomizes the sentiment Alkazi expresses, serving as the ultimate visual almanac of Husain’s most iconic images from this period. Comprising thirteen unique panels that occupy almost fourteen feet across a single canvas, Gram Yatra, which means ‘village pilgrimage,’ is not only one of the largest, but perhaps the most significant painting by the artist from the 1950s. This monumental painting is Husain’s magnum opus, a cornerstone of his oeuvre celebrating the diversity and dynamism of a newly independent nation. As such, Gram Yatra is an exemplar of nation-building through art.
Husain moved to Bombay in 1937, starting his career by painting billboards for feature films and designing furniture and toys for children. It was not until a decade later, in 1947, that he joined the newly formed Progressive Artists' Group, founded on the eve of India's Independence. This collection of like-minded avant-garde artists absorbed folk art, classical painting and sculpture, combining them with Western art to produce several unique modes of expression. Husain, along with fellow members of the group, including Sayed Haider Raza and Francis Newton Souza, emerged as a key cultural standard-bearer in a newly independent India. Now considered the most eminent masters of Indian Modernism, their art in this critical period reveled in and exalted the country’s new liberation, while acknowledging its painful legacy of Partition and many of the new socioeconomic challenges it faced. As a Muslim, Husain found himself in a minority in the predominantly Hindu India and was acutely aware of the trauma of Partition and the sectarianism, violence and displacement suffered by so many. His art sought not to dismiss this trauma, but to express the spirit of a new independent India that was hopeful, optimistic, and united in its diversity. As he saw it, there was more in common to unite all Indians than differences that could divide them.
In the decade following independence, Husain’s work increasingly focused on subjects that combined rural life with mythology and symbolism, drawing inspiration from the historical visual culture of India. This was largely precipitated by a watershed trip Husain and Souza made to Delhi to visit an exhibition of classical Indian painting and sculpture at the Viceregal Lodge in 1948. Husain recalls, “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 in 1948 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 colours – very boldly as I did with cinema hoardings [...] I went to town [...] That was the breaking point” (Artist statement, P. Nandy, The Illustrated Weekly of India, December 4-10, 1983). From this moment onwards, these influences acted as guiding principles in Husain’s oeuvre, and are manifest in each of the thirteen panels that comprise Gram Yatra.
The 1950s are regarded by many art historians as the most seminal and significant years of Husain’s career. During this decade, Husain travelled extensively, not only within India but for the first time internationally as well. It was his visits to China in 1952 and Europe in 1953, immediately before Gram Yatra was painted, that encouraged the development of his iconic visual vocabulary. Richard Bartholomew and Shiv Kapur, in their landmark monograph on the artist published in 1972, discuss the significance of Husain’s travels on his practice. “In 1952 he visited China and was deeply impressed by the vitality of calligraphic line in Chinese painting. The next year he visited Europe for the first time and saw the works of such modern masters as Paul Klee, Picasso, Matisse, and Modigliani, whom he had thus far known only through books and reproductions. These direct encounters released his own intuitions and perceptions: in other artists' use of line, form and color, and in their handling of symbols, he found confirmation of his own inner promptings. What Husain sought, whether in this formative period or in the course of his subsequent artistic development, was not violent seizures or radical changes of mood and method but only nuances in the raga of his life in art” (R. Bartholomew and S. Kapur, Husain, New York, 1972, p. 36).
Over the course of these formative few years in the early 1950s, Husain synthesized the influences of Eastern artistic traditions and Western modernism to develop his own unique idiom. The artist’s lyrical paintings of the period celebrated the village and folk tradition, capturing the charm and color of the Indian countryside in its most lyrical state, with men and women in various stylized modes of work and rest, accompanied by playful animals representing key cultural signifiers. Gram Yatra includes the most celebrated images of this formative period, bringing Husain’s modern techniques together in one epic visual voyage. The painting presents all the elements of Husain’s early practice on a single canvas – his bright and bold palette, folk subjects and imposing sculptural figures are complemented by calligraphic brushstrokes influenced by Chinese art, cubist forms, flattened figures, and even the whimsical influence of Paul Klee.
Husain, in this widescreen vignette format, creates a visual storyboard for India in the 1950s. Each of the thirteen panels of Gram Yatra captures distinct moments from village life, representing key themes and signifiers in his visual lexicon. The overall composition is anchored by an exquisite large central image of a man and woman riding a bullock-drawn cart, the forebear for his iconic painting Yatra from 1956, now in the collection of the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi. Husain captures this idyllic scene in the bright colors of Basholi miniature painting, heightened by his use of metallic paint. Such paints were not freely available in India at the time, and must have been acquired abroad on Husain’s travels only a year earlier. The village huts in the background are set against an auburn sky as the protagonists set out on their village pilgrimage.
The image of the woman or mother appears multiple times in this large-format painting. Dancing with a drummer in the traditional tribhanga or triaxial stance, this “typical high-breasted and taut female figure of Mathura sculpture represented in [Husain’s] eyes a principle of energy and dynamism" (R. Bartholomew and S. Kapur, Husain, New York, 1972, p. 36). The figure appears again in an intimate side-profile portrait, milking a cow, riding a cart, taking a moment to rest with a fully laden basket, red skirts adorned in delicate patterns, bathing by a well as others draw up water, using a chakki or grain mill, and playing joyfully with young babies and children. In all these moments, Husain champions the matriarch of the village. These various representations can be seen as representing fertility, creation, birth and nature – not only in the context of the village, but also for the newly independent, modern India.
Significantly, Husain includes the vertical image of a male figure on the right-hand side of this painting as the lone patriarch. Dressed in a simple lungi, wearing a taveez or amulet around his neck and carrying a plough, his right arm breaks through the picture plane, extending to support one of the other panels, a landscape with fields. This depiction of a farmer as guardian and sustainer of the land may also be read as a self-portrait, given the signature dark beard of the artist. The obscured face is a motif Husain turned to more frequently in his later works; however, here it bestows the male figure with an almost prophetic quality, as if the artist is foretelling this village pilgrimage, his outstretched arm physically and metaphorically holding the narrative together.
Two vignettes use animals in contrasting ways. The blue monochromatic image of a fish is presented as a symbolic motif, commonly used to denote fertility, abundance, and creation. The other animal image, perhaps the most playful of the whole composition, depicts a monkey scaling a tall tree with a donkey at its base and birds nestling in its branches. The 1956 version of Yatra includes an image of Hanuman in the cart holding up the village, linking mythology and rural life, and perhaps this monkey is an antecedent to this conclusion. The most unique vignettes in Gram Yatra, however, are the two landscapes. One, at the lower left, is flattened and cubist in appearance, while the other, held up by the farmer, portrays open fields and a hill under the sun and is rendered with short calligraphic strokes, reflecting the clear influence of Husain’s recent trips to Europe and China over the previous two years.
Perhaps the most celebrated work by the artist from this decade is Zameen, painted in 1955 and acquired by the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi. Zameen earned Husain the Lalit Kala Akademi award in 1955 and was recently displayed at the Venice Biennale in 2019, more than sixty years after it was painted, as part of the India Pavilion exhibition. Zameen, just like Gram Yatra, is a compendium of Husain’s pictorial language of this period and a hallmark of his style. Both monumental paintings read like friezes utilizing the same widescreen storyboard format, where each vignette captures a narrative scene or landscape. Gram Yatra, painted the year before Zameen, is unquestionably of comparable significance to this other masterpiece and one of the only other examples of work from this period of this scale. Interestingly, there are photographs and anecdotal examples of Husain traveling across Europe with similar long rolls of canvas, on which he had painted multiple pictures. Exhibiting them as a single roll, he would only separate each image to sell them if he had to.
Given that its male protagonist breaks out of his frame, and the fact that it was exhibited and purchased ‘as is’ the year it was painted, it seems that Husain intended for Gram Yatra to remain in its present format with its multiple vignettes contributing to the same epic narrative about village life in India. Having left India in 1954, the year it was painted, and having stayed in a private Oslo collection and then a hospital in Norway since then, it is an honor to present this masterpiece that has remained unexhibited and, for most, unseen for the last seventy years.
Husain painted Gram Yatra to celebrate India, both for its glorious past and the future promises it holds. His carefully selected images are subplots that come together to relate the literal and metaphorical story of a newly independent India. A thrilling rediscovery, this painting offers an insight into Husain’s extraordinary ability to blend traditional iconography with modernist aesthetics, which continues to resonate in the canons of both Indian and global modern art. Husain draws the viewer into this multifaceted world, bringing them on a personal pilgrimage – one mirrored by the artist’s own journey and symbolizing a critical moment of optimism for a new, independent nation brimming with potential and possibility.
Dr. Leon Elias Volodarsky (1894–1962)
Dr. Leon Elias Volodarsky, affectionately known as Volo, led a fascinating, nomadic life that spanned multiple continents and conflicts and was defined by passion and perseverance through adversity. Volodarsky was born into a Jewish family in Schultz, a village in rural Ukraine, in 1894. As a teenager, he left his hometown in search of better opportunities, and ended up in Belgium. However, it was not long before Europe was thrown into turmoil with the outbreak of hostilities in World War I. The young Volodarsky enlisted with the allied forces and was deployed to the trenches at Ypres in Belgium. His time on the front lines was cut short, however, when he fell ill and was evacuated to England to recuperate. Following his discharge from the army, Volodarsky struggled to make a living, taking on menial jobs in London. Deciding to return home, he found passage on a ship destined for Russia. It was on this journey that fate intervened. When the ship made an unscheduled stop at Kristiansand in Norway, Volodarsky had second thoughts about his return and disembarked.
With no connections, money or knowledge of the language, the young Ukrainian had to take on factory work to survive. A chance encounter with Marie Antonia Aniksdal, a sympathetic politician from Oslo, afforded Volodarsky the help and encouragement he needed to enroll in language class while working at the factory. Despite huge disadvantages and adversity, within a year, he passed the Norwegian language exam, and by 1920, was able to gain admission to the University of Oslo from where he graduated as a medical doctor in 1926. Volodarsky’s medical training included psychiatry, internal medicine and surgery, and over the next two decades he built a strong reputation as a respectable doctor in his adopted home.
With the outbreak of World War II and the subsequent occupation of Norway by the Nazis in 1941, Volodarsky, being of Jewish descent, was forced to flee the country. He escaped Norway by skiing across the mountains to Sweden, and from there made his way to England once again. From England, he joined the Norwegian armed forces as a medical officer, providing care to the sick and wounded in cities such as Cardiff, London, Newcastle and Edinburgh. It was during this time that he found his calling as a humanitarian. Following the war, Volodarsky returned to Norway, but his humanitarian work continued and would remain a cornerstone of his activities for the rest of his life. He soon found himself serving the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) in China, where he worked in Canton (now Guangzhou) to help build a hospital under incredibly adverse conditions. Five years later, Volodarsky returned to Oslo fearing persecution following the communist revolution and founding of the People’s Republic of China.
When the Korean War started in 1950, Volodarsky once again offered his services, joining the Norwegian Army Field Hospital there. It was on his journey back from his mission in Korea that he had a chance encounter with colleagues from the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva. Serendipitously, they asked if he could head a WHO team to set up a thoracic surgery training center in New Delhi. Volo agreed, and at the age of 60, on 7 April 1954, arrived in India to start work. Over the course of a productive year, he established a center for surgical treatment of pulmonary tuberculosis from the ground up. Over Volodarsky’s many travels he had also developed a strong appreciation for art, which he began to collect passionately for his home in Oslo. It is no surprise then, that during his stay in Delhi, he visited museums and galleries whenever he could. On one such gallery visit, Volo encountered the monumental painting, Untitled (Gram Yatra) by Maqbool Fida Husain, and immediately inquired about the artist and acquired the work. This masterpiece travelled back to Oslo with Volodarsky, where it became the cornerstone of his art collection.
Volodarsky’s ties with Delhi endured, and in the late 1950s, several doctors from India made a trip to the University Hospital in Oslo where he worked for training in neurosurgery techniques. Volodarsky remained in Norway until his death in 1962, after which Untitled (Gram Yatra), now referred to as ‘The Volodarsky Husain’, was bequeathed to this hospital. Volodarsky’s legacy endures not only through his contributions to healthcare and humanitarian aid around the world, but also through this painting, the Volodarsky Husain, which is being offered for sale just over seventy years since it was painted to benefit the training of future generations of doctors.
This painting encapsulates the essence of Volodarsky’s life, defined by resilience, generosity and a deep appreciation for beauty and the human spirit in even the darkest moments and places. His travels took him across continents and warzones, but through it all, Volodarsky remained dedicated to the service of others whether through his medical practice, humanitarian work or support for the arts. We now know that Volodarsky and Husain met in person in 1954, and the parallels between the two nomadic figures who touched the lives of so many others is clear. Volodarsky’s ability to navigate the complexities of his various roles – as a refugee, soldier, humanitarian and collector – mirrors Husain’s artistic evolution from a struggling self-taught painter to a widely celebrated Modern Master. The painting thus represents Volodarsky’s and Husain’s parallel journeys. This connection between the two, even if indirect, reflects the power of art to transcend boundaries, uniting people from different corners of the world.
- Ebrahim Alkazi, 1978
Maqbool Fida Husain is widely regarded as the most renowned figure in the story of modern Indian art. The high-profile, charismatic artist pioneered an energetic and innovative style uniquely his own, in his quest to establish what it meant to be a modern artist in India. Drawing inspiration from Indian classical art, both miniature painting and sculpture, and combining that with the expressionist dynamism of Western modernism, Husain created an aesthetic that remains instantly recognizable. In the decade following India’s independence in 1947, Husain presented a new modern art for a new modern India. As the collector, gallerist and historian Ebrahim Alkazi elegantly encapsulated in his monograph on the artist, “behind every stroke of the artist's brush is a vast hinterland of traditional concepts, forms, meanings. [Husain’s] vision is never uniquely his own; it is a new perspective given to collective experience of his race [...] Husain’s concept is intensely poetic: with a stroke of genius, the entire mythic world which has enriched the minds of the common people is brought vividly alive. Past and present, myth and reality are shown to exist simultaneously in the Indian imagination” (E. Alkazi, M. F. Husain: The Modern Artist & Tradition, New Delhi, 1978, p. 17).
Untitled (Gram Yatra) (the Volodarsky Husain) epitomizes the sentiment Alkazi expresses, serving as the ultimate visual almanac of Husain’s most iconic images from this period. Comprising thirteen unique panels that occupy almost fourteen feet across a single canvas, Gram Yatra, which means ‘village pilgrimage,’ is not only one of the largest, but perhaps the most significant painting by the artist from the 1950s. This monumental painting is Husain’s magnum opus, a cornerstone of his oeuvre celebrating the diversity and dynamism of a newly independent nation. As such, Gram Yatra is an exemplar of nation-building through art.
Husain moved to Bombay in 1937, starting his career by painting billboards for feature films and designing furniture and toys for children. It was not until a decade later, in 1947, that he joined the newly formed Progressive Artists' Group, founded on the eve of India's Independence. This collection of like-minded avant-garde artists absorbed folk art, classical painting and sculpture, combining them with Western art to produce several unique modes of expression. Husain, along with fellow members of the group, including Sayed Haider Raza and Francis Newton Souza, emerged as a key cultural standard-bearer in a newly independent India. Now considered the most eminent masters of Indian Modernism, their art in this critical period reveled in and exalted the country’s new liberation, while acknowledging its painful legacy of Partition and many of the new socioeconomic challenges it faced. As a Muslim, Husain found himself in a minority in the predominantly Hindu India and was acutely aware of the trauma of Partition and the sectarianism, violence and displacement suffered by so many. His art sought not to dismiss this trauma, but to express the spirit of a new independent India that was hopeful, optimistic, and united in its diversity. As he saw it, there was more in common to unite all Indians than differences that could divide them.
In the decade following independence, Husain’s work increasingly focused on subjects that combined rural life with mythology and symbolism, drawing inspiration from the historical visual culture of India. This was largely precipitated by a watershed trip Husain and Souza made to Delhi to visit an exhibition of classical Indian painting and sculpture at the Viceregal Lodge in 1948. Husain recalls, “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 in 1948 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 colours – very boldly as I did with cinema hoardings [...] I went to town [...] That was the breaking point” (Artist statement, P. Nandy, The Illustrated Weekly of India, December 4-10, 1983). From this moment onwards, these influences acted as guiding principles in Husain’s oeuvre, and are manifest in each of the thirteen panels that comprise Gram Yatra.
The 1950s are regarded by many art historians as the most seminal and significant years of Husain’s career. During this decade, Husain travelled extensively, not only within India but for the first time internationally as well. It was his visits to China in 1952 and Europe in 1953, immediately before Gram Yatra was painted, that encouraged the development of his iconic visual vocabulary. Richard Bartholomew and Shiv Kapur, in their landmark monograph on the artist published in 1972, discuss the significance of Husain’s travels on his practice. “In 1952 he visited China and was deeply impressed by the vitality of calligraphic line in Chinese painting. The next year he visited Europe for the first time and saw the works of such modern masters as Paul Klee, Picasso, Matisse, and Modigliani, whom he had thus far known only through books and reproductions. These direct encounters released his own intuitions and perceptions: in other artists' use of line, form and color, and in their handling of symbols, he found confirmation of his own inner promptings. What Husain sought, whether in this formative period or in the course of his subsequent artistic development, was not violent seizures or radical changes of mood and method but only nuances in the raga of his life in art” (R. Bartholomew and S. Kapur, Husain, New York, 1972, p. 36).
Over the course of these formative few years in the early 1950s, Husain synthesized the influences of Eastern artistic traditions and Western modernism to develop his own unique idiom. The artist’s lyrical paintings of the period celebrated the village and folk tradition, capturing the charm and color of the Indian countryside in its most lyrical state, with men and women in various stylized modes of work and rest, accompanied by playful animals representing key cultural signifiers. Gram Yatra includes the most celebrated images of this formative period, bringing Husain’s modern techniques together in one epic visual voyage. The painting presents all the elements of Husain’s early practice on a single canvas – his bright and bold palette, folk subjects and imposing sculptural figures are complemented by calligraphic brushstrokes influenced by Chinese art, cubist forms, flattened figures, and even the whimsical influence of Paul Klee.
Husain, in this widescreen vignette format, creates a visual storyboard for India in the 1950s. Each of the thirteen panels of Gram Yatra captures distinct moments from village life, representing key themes and signifiers in his visual lexicon. The overall composition is anchored by an exquisite large central image of a man and woman riding a bullock-drawn cart, the forebear for his iconic painting Yatra from 1956, now in the collection of the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi. Husain captures this idyllic scene in the bright colors of Basholi miniature painting, heightened by his use of metallic paint. Such paints were not freely available in India at the time, and must have been acquired abroad on Husain’s travels only a year earlier. The village huts in the background are set against an auburn sky as the protagonists set out on their village pilgrimage.
The image of the woman or mother appears multiple times in this large-format painting. Dancing with a drummer in the traditional tribhanga or triaxial stance, this “typical high-breasted and taut female figure of Mathura sculpture represented in [Husain’s] eyes a principle of energy and dynamism" (R. Bartholomew and S. Kapur, Husain, New York, 1972, p. 36). The figure appears again in an intimate side-profile portrait, milking a cow, riding a cart, taking a moment to rest with a fully laden basket, red skirts adorned in delicate patterns, bathing by a well as others draw up water, using a chakki or grain mill, and playing joyfully with young babies and children. In all these moments, Husain champions the matriarch of the village. These various representations can be seen as representing fertility, creation, birth and nature – not only in the context of the village, but also for the newly independent, modern India.
Significantly, Husain includes the vertical image of a male figure on the right-hand side of this painting as the lone patriarch. Dressed in a simple lungi, wearing a taveez or amulet around his neck and carrying a plough, his right arm breaks through the picture plane, extending to support one of the other panels, a landscape with fields. This depiction of a farmer as guardian and sustainer of the land may also be read as a self-portrait, given the signature dark beard of the artist. The obscured face is a motif Husain turned to more frequently in his later works; however, here it bestows the male figure with an almost prophetic quality, as if the artist is foretelling this village pilgrimage, his outstretched arm physically and metaphorically holding the narrative together.
Two vignettes use animals in contrasting ways. The blue monochromatic image of a fish is presented as a symbolic motif, commonly used to denote fertility, abundance, and creation. The other animal image, perhaps the most playful of the whole composition, depicts a monkey scaling a tall tree with a donkey at its base and birds nestling in its branches. The 1956 version of Yatra includes an image of Hanuman in the cart holding up the village, linking mythology and rural life, and perhaps this monkey is an antecedent to this conclusion. The most unique vignettes in Gram Yatra, however, are the two landscapes. One, at the lower left, is flattened and cubist in appearance, while the other, held up by the farmer, portrays open fields and a hill under the sun and is rendered with short calligraphic strokes, reflecting the clear influence of Husain’s recent trips to Europe and China over the previous two years.
Perhaps the most celebrated work by the artist from this decade is Zameen, painted in 1955 and acquired by the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi. Zameen earned Husain the Lalit Kala Akademi award in 1955 and was recently displayed at the Venice Biennale in 2019, more than sixty years after it was painted, as part of the India Pavilion exhibition. Zameen, just like Gram Yatra, is a compendium of Husain’s pictorial language of this period and a hallmark of his style. Both monumental paintings read like friezes utilizing the same widescreen storyboard format, where each vignette captures a narrative scene or landscape. Gram Yatra, painted the year before Zameen, is unquestionably of comparable significance to this other masterpiece and one of the only other examples of work from this period of this scale. Interestingly, there are photographs and anecdotal examples of Husain traveling across Europe with similar long rolls of canvas, on which he had painted multiple pictures. Exhibiting them as a single roll, he would only separate each image to sell them if he had to.
Given that its male protagonist breaks out of his frame, and the fact that it was exhibited and purchased ‘as is’ the year it was painted, it seems that Husain intended for Gram Yatra to remain in its present format with its multiple vignettes contributing to the same epic narrative about village life in India. Having left India in 1954, the year it was painted, and having stayed in a private Oslo collection and then a hospital in Norway since then, it is an honor to present this masterpiece that has remained unexhibited and, for most, unseen for the last seventy years.
Husain painted Gram Yatra to celebrate India, both for its glorious past and the future promises it holds. His carefully selected images are subplots that come together to relate the literal and metaphorical story of a newly independent India. A thrilling rediscovery, this painting offers an insight into Husain’s extraordinary ability to blend traditional iconography with modernist aesthetics, which continues to resonate in the canons of both Indian and global modern art. Husain draws the viewer into this multifaceted world, bringing them on a personal pilgrimage – one mirrored by the artist’s own journey and symbolizing a critical moment of optimism for a new, independent nation brimming with potential and possibility.
Dr. Leon Elias Volodarsky (1894–1962)
Dr. Leon Elias Volodarsky, affectionately known as Volo, led a fascinating, nomadic life that spanned multiple continents and conflicts and was defined by passion and perseverance through adversity. Volodarsky was born into a Jewish family in Schultz, a village in rural Ukraine, in 1894. As a teenager, he left his hometown in search of better opportunities, and ended up in Belgium. However, it was not long before Europe was thrown into turmoil with the outbreak of hostilities in World War I. The young Volodarsky enlisted with the allied forces and was deployed to the trenches at Ypres in Belgium. His time on the front lines was cut short, however, when he fell ill and was evacuated to England to recuperate. Following his discharge from the army, Volodarsky struggled to make a living, taking on menial jobs in London. Deciding to return home, he found passage on a ship destined for Russia. It was on this journey that fate intervened. When the ship made an unscheduled stop at Kristiansand in Norway, Volodarsky had second thoughts about his return and disembarked.
With no connections, money or knowledge of the language, the young Ukrainian had to take on factory work to survive. A chance encounter with Marie Antonia Aniksdal, a sympathetic politician from Oslo, afforded Volodarsky the help and encouragement he needed to enroll in language class while working at the factory. Despite huge disadvantages and adversity, within a year, he passed the Norwegian language exam, and by 1920, was able to gain admission to the University of Oslo from where he graduated as a medical doctor in 1926. Volodarsky’s medical training included psychiatry, internal medicine and surgery, and over the next two decades he built a strong reputation as a respectable doctor in his adopted home.
With the outbreak of World War II and the subsequent occupation of Norway by the Nazis in 1941, Volodarsky, being of Jewish descent, was forced to flee the country. He escaped Norway by skiing across the mountains to Sweden, and from there made his way to England once again. From England, he joined the Norwegian armed forces as a medical officer, providing care to the sick and wounded in cities such as Cardiff, London, Newcastle and Edinburgh. It was during this time that he found his calling as a humanitarian. Following the war, Volodarsky returned to Norway, but his humanitarian work continued and would remain a cornerstone of his activities for the rest of his life. He soon found himself serving the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) in China, where he worked in Canton (now Guangzhou) to help build a hospital under incredibly adverse conditions. Five years later, Volodarsky returned to Oslo fearing persecution following the communist revolution and founding of the People’s Republic of China.
When the Korean War started in 1950, Volodarsky once again offered his services, joining the Norwegian Army Field Hospital there. It was on his journey back from his mission in Korea that he had a chance encounter with colleagues from the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva. Serendipitously, they asked if he could head a WHO team to set up a thoracic surgery training center in New Delhi. Volo agreed, and at the age of 60, on 7 April 1954, arrived in India to start work. Over the course of a productive year, he established a center for surgical treatment of pulmonary tuberculosis from the ground up. Over Volodarsky’s many travels he had also developed a strong appreciation for art, which he began to collect passionately for his home in Oslo. It is no surprise then, that during his stay in Delhi, he visited museums and galleries whenever he could. On one such gallery visit, Volo encountered the monumental painting, Untitled (Gram Yatra) by Maqbool Fida Husain, and immediately inquired about the artist and acquired the work. This masterpiece travelled back to Oslo with Volodarsky, where it became the cornerstone of his art collection.
Volodarsky’s ties with Delhi endured, and in the late 1950s, several doctors from India made a trip to the University Hospital in Oslo where he worked for training in neurosurgery techniques. Volodarsky remained in Norway until his death in 1962, after which Untitled (Gram Yatra), now referred to as ‘The Volodarsky Husain’, was bequeathed to this hospital. Volodarsky’s legacy endures not only through his contributions to healthcare and humanitarian aid around the world, but also through this painting, the Volodarsky Husain, which is being offered for sale just over seventy years since it was painted to benefit the training of future generations of doctors.
This painting encapsulates the essence of Volodarsky’s life, defined by resilience, generosity and a deep appreciation for beauty and the human spirit in even the darkest moments and places. His travels took him across continents and warzones, but through it all, Volodarsky remained dedicated to the service of others whether through his medical practice, humanitarian work or support for the arts. We now know that Volodarsky and Husain met in person in 1954, and the parallels between the two nomadic figures who touched the lives of so many others is clear. Volodarsky’s ability to navigate the complexities of his various roles – as a refugee, soldier, humanitarian and collector – mirrors Husain’s artistic evolution from a struggling self-taught painter to a widely celebrated Modern Master. The painting thus represents Volodarsky’s and Husain’s parallel journeys. This connection between the two, even if indirect, reflects the power of art to transcend boundaries, uniting people from different corners of the world.