What Anjolie Ela Menon calls ‘The Husain Horse Syndrome’

We also recurring symbols in your works, from crows and goats to empty chairs.

The crow was my friend when I was in Mumbai, and would paint on the balcony. It would visit me daily and I would give it bread. One day, it said it wanted to be in a painting and jumped in. It has been there ever since. An urban creature that belongs to the city, they are extremely intelligent. An empty chair or a khattiya, meanwhile, symbolises the person who was once there. When the whole world moved to abstraction and cubism, I determinedly remained a figurative painter. Living in this country, one cannot avoid painting people.

Can you talk about your studio in Nizammudin basti?

I have been painting for more than 65 years, and this has been my studio for 26 years. Before this, I used to just paint in any corner of a house. It was MF Husain who taught me how to work without a studio, carry a bag of paints and brushes and sit on the floor anywhere, prop the canvas or board against a wall and paint. As I grew older, I yearned for a studio, a place that I don’t have to clear up and leave, where I could come back to the next day.

You were still a student at Miranda House when Husain saw your work and encouraged you to organise your first solo in 1958. This current exhibition also has one of your early works, a 1956 nude, The Bather.

I was lucky as a young artist. My family knew Husain, who used to live in Naaz hotel near Jama Masjid. One day, he saw my work and said I should exhibit. So, my first exhibition was organised at our house in Lodi Estate, where Husain set up stands with bamboos in the garden and also designed the invite. We showed 52 paintings and he took 20 of those to the Bhulabhai Desai Memorial Institute in Mumbai. I was only 17, and was staying with an Admiral friend of my father. One day, Husain turned up barefoot in his painted car to pick me and when the guard asked who he was, he said, “Anjolie didi ka driver”. In Mumbai, I met all the great artists of the time, including VS Gaitonde and Tyeb Mehta.

You studied art at the Sir JJ School in Mumbai for a year, why did you not complete the course? In 1959, you went to France, how did that influence your art?

My mother wanted me to be a writer, and my father, a doctor. It was my art teacher Sushil Mukherjee at Lawrence School, Lovedale, who convinced them that I should pursue art. He was a wonderful teacher, and when I went to Sir JJ School of Art, within a year I felt I knew it all. I won a bronze medal even though I was a fresher. In hindsight, I feel I was possibly quite arrogant then, at the time I felt there was nothing more I could learn there. So, when my father moved to Delhi, I took admission in literature at Miranda House.

Paris happened when I received a French government scholarship to study at Nationale des Beaux-Arts. I saw a lot of European art there, and the influence was evident in my work. After my marriage, the influence of the South became prominent – the namboodiris, the pujaris, became part of the work. I also found a stash of early photographs in Kollengode Palace (Thrissur, Kerala), as my husband belonged to that family. In 1962-63, I also visited Kumbh. My mother belonged to the Brahmo Samaj and my father was agnostic, so we never had any access to mythology till I got married.

Tell us about your experiments in various mediums.

I had already been painting within window frames and jharokhas for about a decade when in the early ’90s I also painted on junk furniture that was exhibited at Jehangir Art Gallery in Mumbai. I was against wasting plastic wrapping, so instead, we bought razais to wrap the works to be transported from Madras and Delhi to Mumbai. These were piled in the centre of the gallery, and we had lovers holding hands and sitting. When the exhibition was over, I went out one night and gave them to beggars on the street. I think it was, inadvertently, one of our first installations. Soon after, Husain did an installation with newspapers, where he filled the gallery with crumpled newspapers.

Towards the end of the ’90s, I began experimenting with digital works, morphing two-three of my paintings from different periods to create one image. I did not know if it would be accepted, but Sharon Apparao, my gallerist at the time, encouraged me. The series was received with scepticism in India but it did brilliantly in New York. Around this time, I also got an opportunity to work on glass sculptures in Murano and collaborate with Antonio Da Ros on the same.

You also coined an interesting term, ‘The Husain Horse Syndrome’. Can you tell us about that?

The phrase basically describes something you repeat again and again, and it becomes a part of you. When you think of Husain, you think of horses. Every well-known artist is well-known because he/she has developed a signature, and that is the hardest thing to do – artists can struggle for years and not be able to do it. It is not repeating oneself, it is being recognisable.

You are also working on a culinary book. Tell us about it.

I come from a mixed family. My grandmother was American, and she brought us up because my mother died when we were very young. We were brought up on a lot of American food, especially from Boston, New England, from where she came. Both my aunts were fabulous cooks, and one of them was married to a French man. My father, who was a surgeon, was also a wonderful cook. Every Sunday, he would go to Jama Masjid and buy fish, which he would cook. He did wonderful Bengali food and raan. He enjoyed inviting friends for meals, and I inherited that from him. I cook quite often, and like to put together a variety of food where the recipe is not fusion but the combination of things. There could be one dish from Burma, another from Thailand, America and so on. The book will have several of my recipes.

How do you look at the expanding definition of art?

I think the definition of art has been stretched too much. To me, one of the factors certainly should be skill, and skills have been lost. Young artists out of art school don’t even bother to learn the skills. You jettison the skill later, say I don’t need it, but I think it is a necessary part of learning how to see. There is a lot of conceptual art that is self-indulgent. Art should be people related but it is not always the case nowadays.