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Lot Essay
During the six decades of his artistic career, Maqbool Fida Husain contributed greatly to the development and popularization of modern Indian art. Primarily, as Yashodhara Dalmia explains, he “deliver[s] the common man from the ordinariness of his existence to the international arena” by formulating a modern vocabulary that had its roots fixed firmly in the Indian people and their traditions. (Y. Dalmia, The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, New Delhi, 2001, p. 101)
This 1950s painting of basket weavers, executed in an earthy palette of brown and ochre, represents Husain’s earliest paintings and illuminates the early development of the figurative idiom that would soon come to define his oeuvre. Combining a naturalistic approach with Husain’s new and innovative expressionism, the figures in this painting bear little relation to their counterparts in real life. Defined by the artist’s thick, rhythmic line, these women are “[…] supremely solitary. They do not communicate with each other. They remain locked in a binding compassion, in a unity of colour and composition divided by a wondrously understanding line.” (S.S. Kapur, Husain, New Delhi, 1961, p. v)
This 1950s painting of basket weavers, executed in an earthy palette of brown and ochre, represents Husain’s earliest paintings and illuminates the early development of the figurative idiom that would soon come to define his oeuvre. Combining a naturalistic approach with Husain’s new and innovative expressionism, the figures in this painting bear little relation to their counterparts in real life. Defined by the artist’s thick, rhythmic line, these women are “[…] supremely solitary. They do not communicate with each other. They remain locked in a binding compassion, in a unity of colour and composition divided by a wondrously understanding line.” (S.S. Kapur, Husain, New Delhi, 1961, p. v)