Osian's Auction Catalogue Indian Modern Contemporary Fine Arts | October 2018

117 Indian Modern Contemporary Fine Arts M. F. Husain b. 17 September 1915 – d. 9 June 2011 Sitar Player Series Oil on canvas, Early 1970s 58.0 x 48.0 in (147.3 x 121.9 cm) Signed in English and Urdu ‘Husain’ t.l. ` 8,000,000 – 12,000,000 $ 111,110 – 166,670 Provenance In the art collection of a Hong Kong & India based N.R.I.; previously acquired directly from the artist M.F. Husain during c.1977-79 by Indian businessman. 49 A magnificent depiction of Husain’s famous Sitar Player Series ‘With a comprehensive view of life investing them, Husain has progressively laid bare his figures. They are given no landscape of time and place, no background except carefully worked tonal tensions. These figures have no drapery. They come clothed only in colour, except for a gay turban here, a hint of hair or jewellery there. They come from a territory of the mind, at once idea and living reality. Their validity is in the soft and warm curve of their flesh, in the look in their eyes, in the separateness that marks them essentially human. They come from a territory however, recognizably Indian in its sensibility and symbolization: contemplative, brooding, often heavy with the mystery of life. Men here are gay and thoughtful; women are lyrical, sad, watchful, knowing and curious, fecund without being sensual.’ Shiv S.Kapur, rpt. in Husain . LKA 1961. ‘Husain’s paintings of this period reveal an almost prophetic foreshadowing of his climactic emotional experiences…His figures are frequently distorted or metamorphosed…The central concern of Husain’s art, and its dominant motif, is woman, and it is this motif that now best embodies these two moods. Man, in Husain’s view, is dynamic only in heroism. He is diminished by confusion and broken by unbelief, and these are unheroic and unbelieving times. Spiritually, woman is more enduring. Pain comes naturally to her, as do compassion and a sense of the birth and death of things…strong, angular lines and flatly applied patches of colour are the instrumentation of the female form. Woman is seen either as a creation of lyric poetry, a sculpturesque and rhythmic figure of dance, or as an agent of fecundity….’ Shiv S.Kapur rpt in Maqbool Fida Husain Harry N. Abrams Inc.1970; p.45-6. Detailed Artist Biography osianama.com/artists/ m-f-husain