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Lot Essay
During the six decades of his artistic career, Maqbool Fida Husain contributed greatly to the development and popularisation of modern Indian art. Primarily, as Yashodhara Dalmia explains, he "deliver[ed] 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 a farmer working the fields with his two bullocks, represents Husain's earliest work and illuminates the early development of the figurative idiom that would soon come to define his oeuvre. Combining use of bright colour owing to the his former career as a movie billboard painter 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 subjects 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)
In every aspect of M.F. Husain's early paintings like this one, in colour, 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, 1978, pp. 3-4)
This 1950s painting of a farmer working the fields with his two bullocks, represents Husain's earliest work and illuminates the early development of the figurative idiom that would soon come to define his oeuvre. Combining use of bright colour owing to the his former career as a movie billboard painter 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 subjects 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)
In every aspect of M.F. Husain's early paintings like this one, in colour, 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, 1978, pp. 3-4)