For long the face of Indian modernism, M F Husain’s self-exile from India in 2006 pushed him into the oblivion of a marketplace in which his peers were shattering records even as he was left to reminiscence about Bombay’s streetside bun-maska and chai from his homes-away-from-home in Dubai and London, till his demise in 2011. By then, Tyeb Mehta, V S Gaitonde, S H Raza and F N Souza had displaced him from the peak of the value-based pyramid that he had commanded for much of the 20th century, combining sharp marketing acumen and popularity with his prodigious talent. He wasn’t jealous of his fellow artists, but he was competitive. When Mehta broke the auction record for India’s most expensive painting with his Kali that fetched Rs 1.5 crore in 2002, Husain resorted to devising a sale of Rs 100 crore for a series of his works by funding part of the advance money to the hapless and unknown Guru Swarup Srivastava who was made the face of this farcical deal.
Twenty years later, Husain has made good on that promise with the spectacular Rs 118 crore record for his Gram Yatra, bid by Kiran Nadar in a Christie’s auction in New York in which several other works by the artist exceeded their high estimates. Hours ahead of that momentous breakthrough, I was talking to a group of fellows attending an art appreciation course at New Delhi’s National Gallery of Modern Art about his award-winning Zameen, a companion piece created parallelly to Gram Yatra that is similar compositionally as well as in size. Zameen is regarded as his masterpiece; Gram Yatra no less so— even though it was mostly unknown, having been bought by Norway-based Dr Leon Elias Volodarsky in 1954, the year that it was painted, when he was in New Delhi as part of a World Health Organisation team to set up a thoracic surgery training centre in the city. A decade later, his descendants bequeathed the painting to the Oslo University Hospital. One can only speculate whether its patients and medical practitioners were aware of the painting’s significance, its artist’s identity — or now its history.
The billboard painter who rose to prominence as part of the Souza-led Progressive Artists’ Group, Husain broke the hegemony of art’s elitist preoccupations by choosing subaltern subjects that reflected the grassroots reality of a closely-knit, culture-proscribed society. Both Zameen and Gram Yatra echo this preoccupation. Three decades of popularity and success later, Husain would mock this earlier antecedent with his Raj series extolling polo-playing maharajas and vicereines inviting maharanis to high teas in the garden.
His art changed in response to transitions across South Asia and he was both admired as well as critiqued for his choices — including depictions of Indira Gandhi as Durga during the Emergency years. His libertarian syncretism allowed him to borrow subjects freely from religions around the world, but it was Hinduism that nurtured some of his strongest themes based on the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. But these were never religious paintings, something his far-right critics failed to understand when they went looking for ways to lynch his reputation.
Cinema too recurred in his work and his obsessions continued to fuel his practice till his end, even if it meant that the Mahabharata was replaced by his Mughal-e-Azam series, and actor Madhuri Dixit became a muse in a way that objectivised her. Homesick and heartbroken in the last five years of his life, he continued to compete for the top prize with his series on the Islamic civilisation for the Qatar royal family and the Indian civilisation for the London-based Mittals — both of which were destined to remain incomplete.
Husain’s posthumous triumph at Thursday’s auction must not be viewed in isolation. This decade alone has experienced the tumbling of artist records faster than falling dominoes even as the base of artists has widened to include those disparaged till recently as second or third tier for their previous lack of financial success. There is a surge of interest, too, in pre-modern art, works by Anglo-Indian artists, Company Paintings and underserved painters and sculptors. As the insatiable appetite for quality art grows across platforms that are helping to sustain it, a positive fallout is likely to be growing concerns around conservation and restoration, thereby extending the life of hitherto neglected or poorly preserved artworks.
While this might be heartening for Indian art in general, somewhere in the afterworld, where Husain is celebrating his newfound fiscal potency, Eid has come a little early.
The writer is a senior vice president, DAG, and author of M F Husain: The Journey of a Legend
