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Lot Essay
Universally acclaimed as one of India's most significant modern masters, Maqbool Fida Husain is unparalleled in the breadth of his artistic vision and his sophisticated recontextualization of Indian artistic traditions and European modernism. From his humble beginnings as a billboard painter, Husain successfully transcended the critical constraints of regional aesthetics and public opinion to become one of the country’s most widely recognized artists. As a founding member of the Progressive Artists' Group, each work painted by Husain is a paean to the theory of the artist as an individual visionary engaging in an act of metaphysical creation.
Over the course of his extensive career, Husain developed and explored several iconic tropes; powerful images he would return to time and again in his artistic practice. Most potent among these are the artist’s depictions of horses and the female figure and his juxtapositions of the two, their bodies brought together in dynamic and entwined compositions.
The horse became a central part of Husain’s oeuvre in the early 1950s, when he first painted the animal. The artist almost always portrays his equine figures as strong creatures, usually galloping, with reared heads, flared nostrils and a tremendous sense of dynamism. His inspiration to paint horses was derived from a combination of sources, notably his travels in China and Italy, where he studied Tang pottery horses and discovered the equestrian sculptures of the artist Marino Marini (1901-1980). However, what is likely to have been even more influential is an event he witnessed for the first time as a fifteen-year-old boy: once a year during Muharram, when the religious mourned the death of Imam Husain, the Prophet’s son, they would carry tazias or effigies of his faithful horse in a procession through the streets.
While the artist’s horses are proud, powerful and valiant, the female figures in Husain’s work are just as important and integral to his oeuvre. Whether he chooses to depict them in simple rural settings attending to everyday chores, as all-powerful goddesses, both munificent and wrathful, or astride galloping stallions traversing the skies, as in this painting, his women are just as symbolic of inner strength and fortitude as his horses are.
In the present lot, a large-format painting from 1981 titled Lightning, Husain brings these two emblematic figures together, in powerful union. Here, the female figure appears sensitive, nurturing and soft, while the horse is active, protective and intense. The starkness of this pairing lends the painting a palpable energy, leaving viewers waiting for the pair to leap from the confines of the canvas and continue on their journey together. Husain paints the woman holding the horse’s head to her own in a moment of tenderness and silent communication. This calm contrasts with the horse’s urgent prancing, its foreleg raised and tail swaying. Equally absorbed in the interest of the other, neither figure engages the gaze of the viewer. Though their bodies face different directions, they move as one, creating a sense of synchronicity and symmetry in the work. Similarly, the rich browns of the woman’s skin contrast with the textured white brushstrokes the artist uses to portray the horse, balancing each other like yin and yang or shiv and shakti, coming together to create the universe.
“The relationship of the body to the stallion is a paradox of frenzy and unhurried movement. An elegant dissection of space with line and angle. There is a measure of squared off posture and high leaping which suggests the free dance of Martha Graham or hints at the ecstasy that is enclosed by the flashing lines of Bernini's sculptural composition [...] the brute strength of horses born and released from fabulous regions mutate in to thunderbolt, energies, phallic and omnipotent” (R. Shahani, Let History Cut Across Me Without Me, New Delhi, 1993, p. 8) .
Here, Husain perhaps intends the title Lightning to refer to both the nature, power and speed of the horse, and the way in which the paired figures streak across the ultramarine sky like a lightning bolt. As the artist famously said, “My horses like lightning, cut across many horizons [...] the cavalcade of my horses is multidimensional” (Artist statement, Husain, Mumbai, 1987, p. 83).
Over the course of his extensive career, Husain developed and explored several iconic tropes; powerful images he would return to time and again in his artistic practice. Most potent among these are the artist’s depictions of horses and the female figure and his juxtapositions of the two, their bodies brought together in dynamic and entwined compositions.
The horse became a central part of Husain’s oeuvre in the early 1950s, when he first painted the animal. The artist almost always portrays his equine figures as strong creatures, usually galloping, with reared heads, flared nostrils and a tremendous sense of dynamism. His inspiration to paint horses was derived from a combination of sources, notably his travels in China and Italy, where he studied Tang pottery horses and discovered the equestrian sculptures of the artist Marino Marini (1901-1980). However, what is likely to have been even more influential is an event he witnessed for the first time as a fifteen-year-old boy: once a year during Muharram, when the religious mourned the death of Imam Husain, the Prophet’s son, they would carry tazias or effigies of his faithful horse in a procession through the streets.
While the artist’s horses are proud, powerful and valiant, the female figures in Husain’s work are just as important and integral to his oeuvre. Whether he chooses to depict them in simple rural settings attending to everyday chores, as all-powerful goddesses, both munificent and wrathful, or astride galloping stallions traversing the skies, as in this painting, his women are just as symbolic of inner strength and fortitude as his horses are.
In the present lot, a large-format painting from 1981 titled Lightning, Husain brings these two emblematic figures together, in powerful union. Here, the female figure appears sensitive, nurturing and soft, while the horse is active, protective and intense. The starkness of this pairing lends the painting a palpable energy, leaving viewers waiting for the pair to leap from the confines of the canvas and continue on their journey together. Husain paints the woman holding the horse’s head to her own in a moment of tenderness and silent communication. This calm contrasts with the horse’s urgent prancing, its foreleg raised and tail swaying. Equally absorbed in the interest of the other, neither figure engages the gaze of the viewer. Though their bodies face different directions, they move as one, creating a sense of synchronicity and symmetry in the work. Similarly, the rich browns of the woman’s skin contrast with the textured white brushstrokes the artist uses to portray the horse, balancing each other like yin and yang or shiv and shakti, coming together to create the universe.
“The relationship of the body to the stallion is a paradox of frenzy and unhurried movement. An elegant dissection of space with line and angle. There is a measure of squared off posture and high leaping which suggests the free dance of Martha Graham or hints at the ecstasy that is enclosed by the flashing lines of Bernini's sculptural composition [...] the brute strength of horses born and released from fabulous regions mutate in to thunderbolt, energies, phallic and omnipotent” (R. Shahani, Let History Cut Across Me Without Me, New Delhi, 1993, p. 8) .
Here, Husain perhaps intends the title Lightning to refer to both the nature, power and speed of the horse, and the way in which the paired figures streak across the ultramarine sky like a lightning bolt. As the artist famously said, “My horses like lightning, cut across many horizons [...] the cavalcade of my horses is multidimensional” (Artist statement, Husain, Mumbai, 1987, p. 83).