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拍品專文
My paintings, drawings and the recent paper work have been directly influenced by my experience of traditional Indian dolls, paper toys, shapes galore. The experience of being with them, and the inspiration to create them, are inseparable. A painter is a child in his purity of feeling - for only then he creates with authenticity of his being.
- Maqbool Fida Husain, 1955
From his humble beginnings as a billboard painter in Bombay, Maqbool Fida Husain successfully transcended critical constraints and financial hardship to establish himself as one of the strongest artistic voices in newly independent India. The artist’s deep engagement with history, civilization and heroic epics aided him in breaking away from rigid academic painting styles and creating a unique and strong artistic voice that never lost sight of the art heritage, energy and rhythm of the vast Indian landscape. Drawing inspiration from classical Indian 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’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 fellow artist Francis Newton Souza made to Delhi to visit an exhibition of classical Indian painting and sculpture at the Viceregal Lodge (now Rashtrapati Bhavan) in 1948, where the artist became acutely conscious of the rich veins of classical Indian aesthetics that he could draw from. Husain recalls, “The exhibition left me both humbled and exhilarated. It was like scaling a mountain and then discovering a whole new range of mountains. Looking at the forms of the Gupta sculptures, experiencing the innocence of Indian folk art and seeing the rawness of colours in Basholi and Pahadi paintings, I knew I had stumbled upon something priceless” (Artist statement, K. Bikram Singh, Maqbool Fida Husain, New Delhi, 2008, p. 60).
Painted in 1953, Puppet Dancers stands as a formidable masterwork from what is regarded by many as the most significant decade of Husain’s career. During this time, Husain travelled extensively within India and internationally. In 1952 he visited China, and a year later, in 1953, “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).
Throughout the 1950s, Husain captured the charm and color of the Indian countryside in its most lyrical state, with men and women at rest and work alongside their homes and animals. It was during this period that Husain painted some of his most iconic works, exhibited them in several countries, and represented India at the Venice Biennale twice. Puppet Dancers is one of these seminal formative works, painted at a critical point in the development of the artist’s unique visual vocabulary and the gestation of modern art in India. Notably, it was painted a year before Gram Yatra, and two years before Zameen, now in the collection of the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi – two of the artist’s most renowned paintings. Viewed in this context, Puppet Dancers takes on layers of meaning and complexity, addressing among other issues the supposed divides between tradition and modernity, past and present, that the newly independent nation of India and its artists were struggling with at the time.
In this painting, Husain synthesizes the influences of Eastern artistic traditions and Western modernism to translate the kinetic energy of a rural puppet performance into a sophisticated choreography of geometric planes. The two figures are rendered in the artist’s unique proto-Cubist idiom of the time, with rich textures and bold outlines, and their exaggerated doll-like proportions pulse with life and authenticity. Drawing on the charm of rural India and his observations of village fairs, Husain portrays the two kathputlis or marionettes in close-up, possibly the same ones he depicted along with a puppeteer in The Pull, painted a year earlier. However, here the figures are liberated from their strings and handler, and pulse with a life of their own, expressing a life and relationship that seem completely autonomous.
Vivid oranges and ochres animate the puppets’ angular forms, which occupy almost the entire painted surface. Set against a striking blue background, the viewer’s focus is directed to the their gestures and the relationship between them. While the kneeling male figure faces the viewer directly and holds up what appears to be a petition or proposal, the female figure faces him, raising one of her hands either in acceptance or protest. Husain wields the figures of the puppets as their puppeteer would, piquing the interest of his viewers by wordlessly relating ancient stories of love, heroism and morality.
In every aspect of Husain’s early paintings like this one, most notably color, form and subject matter, we are reminded that “behind every stroke of the artist's brush is a vast hinterland of traditional concepts, forms, meanings. His vision is never uniquely his own; it is a new perspective given to collective experience of his race. It is in this fundamental sense that we speak of Husain being in the authentic tradition of Indian art. He has been unique in his ability to forge a pictorial language which is indisputably of the contemporary Indian situation but surcharged with all the energies, the rhythms of his art heritage” (E. Alkazi, ‘M.F. Husain: The Modern Artist & Tradition’, Art Heritage, New Delhi, pp. 3-4).
- Maqbool Fida Husain, 1955
From his humble beginnings as a billboard painter in Bombay, Maqbool Fida Husain successfully transcended critical constraints and financial hardship to establish himself as one of the strongest artistic voices in newly independent India. The artist’s deep engagement with history, civilization and heroic epics aided him in breaking away from rigid academic painting styles and creating a unique and strong artistic voice that never lost sight of the art heritage, energy and rhythm of the vast Indian landscape. Drawing inspiration from classical Indian 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’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 fellow artist Francis Newton Souza made to Delhi to visit an exhibition of classical Indian painting and sculpture at the Viceregal Lodge (now Rashtrapati Bhavan) in 1948, where the artist became acutely conscious of the rich veins of classical Indian aesthetics that he could draw from. Husain recalls, “The exhibition left me both humbled and exhilarated. It was like scaling a mountain and then discovering a whole new range of mountains. Looking at the forms of the Gupta sculptures, experiencing the innocence of Indian folk art and seeing the rawness of colours in Basholi and Pahadi paintings, I knew I had stumbled upon something priceless” (Artist statement, K. Bikram Singh, Maqbool Fida Husain, New Delhi, 2008, p. 60).
Painted in 1953, Puppet Dancers stands as a formidable masterwork from what is regarded by many as the most significant decade of Husain’s career. During this time, Husain travelled extensively within India and internationally. In 1952 he visited China, and a year later, in 1953, “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).
Throughout the 1950s, Husain captured the charm and color of the Indian countryside in its most lyrical state, with men and women at rest and work alongside their homes and animals. It was during this period that Husain painted some of his most iconic works, exhibited them in several countries, and represented India at the Venice Biennale twice. Puppet Dancers is one of these seminal formative works, painted at a critical point in the development of the artist’s unique visual vocabulary and the gestation of modern art in India. Notably, it was painted a year before Gram Yatra, and two years before Zameen, now in the collection of the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi – two of the artist’s most renowned paintings. Viewed in this context, Puppet Dancers takes on layers of meaning and complexity, addressing among other issues the supposed divides between tradition and modernity, past and present, that the newly independent nation of India and its artists were struggling with at the time.
In this painting, Husain synthesizes the influences of Eastern artistic traditions and Western modernism to translate the kinetic energy of a rural puppet performance into a sophisticated choreography of geometric planes. The two figures are rendered in the artist’s unique proto-Cubist idiom of the time, with rich textures and bold outlines, and their exaggerated doll-like proportions pulse with life and authenticity. Drawing on the charm of rural India and his observations of village fairs, Husain portrays the two kathputlis or marionettes in close-up, possibly the same ones he depicted along with a puppeteer in The Pull, painted a year earlier. However, here the figures are liberated from their strings and handler, and pulse with a life of their own, expressing a life and relationship that seem completely autonomous.
Vivid oranges and ochres animate the puppets’ angular forms, which occupy almost the entire painted surface. Set against a striking blue background, the viewer’s focus is directed to the their gestures and the relationship between them. While the kneeling male figure faces the viewer directly and holds up what appears to be a petition or proposal, the female figure faces him, raising one of her hands either in acceptance or protest. Husain wields the figures of the puppets as their puppeteer would, piquing the interest of his viewers by wordlessly relating ancient stories of love, heroism and morality.
In every aspect of Husain’s early paintings like this one, most notably color, form and subject matter, we are reminded that “behind every stroke of the artist's brush is a vast hinterland of traditional concepts, forms, meanings. His vision is never uniquely his own; it is a new perspective given to collective experience of his race. It is in this fundamental sense that we speak of Husain being in the authentic tradition of Indian art. He has been unique in his ability to forge a pictorial language which is indisputably of the contemporary Indian situation but surcharged with all the energies, the rhythms of his art heritage” (E. Alkazi, ‘M.F. Husain: The Modern Artist & Tradition’, Art Heritage, New Delhi, pp. 3-4).