Maqbool Fida Husain (1915-2011)

Acquired directly from the artist in the 1960s

Good overall condition.
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The present work, the bold, large-scale canvas by Maqbool Fida Husain, Untitled (The Three Muses, Maya Series), presents a rare and complex composition in which the artist himself appears as the central figure. This extraordinary canvas has taken pride of place in the historic Abe and Jan Weisblat collects ion. “This large painting ended up on their living room wall,” explains daughter Tinky Weisblat, “simply because [Husain] had a fondness for it and didn’t want to sell it to anyone else."

The Husain-like figure in profile at center canvas dominates the painting. Three figures in white raiment rest artfully upon the raised knee of the central figure, at the level of his eye. The long beard of the central figure reaches almost to the length of the outstretched arm, palm turned upward in a gesture evoking introspection, directed perhaps at these three muse-like figures. The composition is fractured by a vertical line dividing the masculine and feminine elements across the Y axis. At right, a nude female stands in three-quarter profile from the back, a classical example of the faceless Husain woman. The composition overall suggests a rarely articulated and intensely personal psychological portrait of the artist.

Critic Shiv Kapur explains that: “like Picasso, Husain has been deeply isolated in his personal life. In response to his inner necessity, his paintings of [the late 1960s/early 1970s] more than ever appear to fracture the metaphor of sex into a tension of opposites, an affair of shadowy alienation that finds darkness at the heart of genesis,” (Kapur, Husain, New York, 1972, p. 46).

Husain has often drawn inspiration from India's rich philosophical tradition and interpreted these ideas in his own way in his work. The present painting from the 1960s is from the diverse series entitled Maya, a theme that is central to both Buddhist and Hindu philosophy; wherein the soteriological goal is to realize the distinction between the Self and Brahman as illusion or maya, to shake off the bondage of the material world, and to ultimately unite with Brahman thereby achieving liberation.  

Husain articulates this esoteric principle in this dreamlike painting using one of his standard motifs; the faceless woman. The form is culled with his signature bold outlines. However, the broad, flat planes of color, dissolving into one another, suggest a shifting, impermanent, tantalizing state between illusion and reality. Of course, for Husain, his late mother was the ultimate archetype of the ephemeral state between illusion and reality. Having no remembrance of his mother’s face was one of the great tragedies of the artist’s life, and inspired one of Husain’s most recognizable, tender and enduring themes.

It is interesting to contrast the expressionist treatment of the present work with that of Husain's contemporaries Akbar Padamsee and Tyeb Mehta, both of whom were experimenting with their own variations of color and form during the same decade. Also compare the present work with an undated Husain oil painting from the Herwitz collects ion, Maya the Dream, in which the central figure (the titular Maya), a nude female, sits in side profile with raised knee, a bold vertical line bisecting her torso. Two figures in white raiment appear at her left whilst a yellow elephant visits Maya in a dream, in a nod to the divine conception of the future Buddha, Siddhartha (see Herwitz, Husain, Delhi, 1988, pl. 94).