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Lot Essay
Throughout his artistic career, which extended over eight decades, Maqbool Fida Husain championed Indian cultural traditions in his paintings in an effort to capture and express his fascination with rasa, or the concept of aesthetic rapture. The interdisciplinary nature of music, sculpture, dance, painting and film provided enormous inspiration to the artist. “He can draw and paint with complete surrender to the sound and graphic representations of these modes. Musical rhythm or pure sound finds its way easily into the schemes of the paintings” (R. Shahani, Let History Cut Across Me without Me, New Delhi, 1993, p. 1).
The present lot offers Husain's masterful synthesis of the traditional Indian subject of a classical musician in a modern artistic language. Painted in a sepia palette and modified Cubist style, this picture is reminiscent of The Accordionist by Pablo Picasso from 1911. However, instead of abstracting the subject and his instrument as Picasso does, Husain focuses on deconstructing only the sitar into a fragmented image made of multiple intersecting planes. Through this fragmentation, Husain allows the viewer to envision the drama and intrigue of the musician’s performance. This contrasts with the very intact form of the musician – soft and gentle, yet intense and controlled – establishing him as the maestro of the scene.
Husain, however, does not reveal the identity of the sitar player to the viewer; instead, he shrouds it with his signature stylized facial features. His arm is wrapped gently around the neck of his instrument as if cradling a lover, and through the downward tilt of his head, his gaze seems to focus on the movement of his fingers across its strings. Behind him, there appear to be two more musicians even more abstracted than himself, perhaps playing the sarangi or vina as accompaniment.
In Untitled (Musician), Husain focuses on one aspect of Indian classical music – raga, or the melodic framework used to create emotion and feeling. There are hundreds of ragas, with thousands of possible variations. Historically, six of them have been depicted in the series of traditional Indian miniatures known as Ragamala or ‘garland of raga’ paintings. In these works, each raga, which is associated with its own mood, color, emotion, time of day and even weather, is depicted through heroes and heroines immersed in inherent drama. In the present lot, Husain draws from this tradition, using sepia tones with hints of grey and green to encompass the musician, his instrument, the accompanists and the background – possibly to evoke the solemn and peaceful sounds of Raga Bhairav for his viewers.
The present lot offers Husain's masterful synthesis of the traditional Indian subject of a classical musician in a modern artistic language. Painted in a sepia palette and modified Cubist style, this picture is reminiscent of The Accordionist by Pablo Picasso from 1911. However, instead of abstracting the subject and his instrument as Picasso does, Husain focuses on deconstructing only the sitar into a fragmented image made of multiple intersecting planes. Through this fragmentation, Husain allows the viewer to envision the drama and intrigue of the musician’s performance. This contrasts with the very intact form of the musician – soft and gentle, yet intense and controlled – establishing him as the maestro of the scene.
Husain, however, does not reveal the identity of the sitar player to the viewer; instead, he shrouds it with his signature stylized facial features. His arm is wrapped gently around the neck of his instrument as if cradling a lover, and through the downward tilt of his head, his gaze seems to focus on the movement of his fingers across its strings. Behind him, there appear to be two more musicians even more abstracted than himself, perhaps playing the sarangi or vina as accompaniment.
In Untitled (Musician), Husain focuses on one aspect of Indian classical music – raga, or the melodic framework used to create emotion and feeling. There are hundreds of ragas, with thousands of possible variations. Historically, six of them have been depicted in the series of traditional Indian miniatures known as Ragamala or ‘garland of raga’ paintings. In these works, each raga, which is associated with its own mood, color, emotion, time of day and even weather, is depicted through heroes and heroines immersed in inherent drama. In the present lot, Husain draws from this tradition, using sepia tones with hints of grey and green to encompass the musician, his instrument, the accompanists and the background – possibly to evoke the solemn and peaceful sounds of Raga Bhairav for his viewers.