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

87 Indian Modern Contemporary Fine Arts M. F. Husain b. 17 September 1915 – d. 9 June 2011 Elephant in Town Oil on canvas, 1961 51.6 x 31.9 in (131.0 x 81.0 cm) S/d in Devanagari ‘Husain 61’ t.l. ` 5,000,000 – 7,500,000 $ 69,440 – 104,170 Provenance Acquired by Simla-based I.A.S. Officer directly from the artist M.F. Husain during the early 1970s. 33 Husain’s metaphor is rich and of great expressiveness. It brings a wide sweep to his way of looking at things, to his many approaches to reality. His symbols and represented objects are often startling in juxtaposition because they are drawn from such far reaches of artistic memory. Dark, intuitive, sometimes traditional symbols are cast within a contemporary design and given meanings that seem valid for this and every other time. And if the innocent in art is also the original, as indeed it is, then innocence is the other noteworthy feature of Husain’s work…Husain wields a quick, nervous line of great sensitiveness and energy. It is a versatile line, capable of both power and poetry. It divides his forms in firm definition, broods among his grouped figures. It pounds across the canvas in his horses, lurks in women’s faces in tender almost tentative hint, or threads sharply across his compositions like a scalpel, separating one figure, one face, from the other in subtly differentiated tones of colour, as though he sculpted his figures from paint. But impeccable draughtsman that he is, Husain is a greater painter and his line is never conceived apart from form and colour, from his exacting demands of spatial organisation. He has spent years exploring the interaction of line and colour in his paintings. Sometimes he has allowed his line greater definition, allowed it to build and divide with power; at others he has sought a more muted line, working inwards from the edges of the canvas, towards a face or a form, and stopping with the line only a suggestion. The result of these years has been a realisation that line moves faster than colour, that the eye catches the colour quicker but also retains it longer than the line. Shiv S. Kapur rpt. in Husain. New Delhi: LKA 1961; pi-v. Detailed Artist Biography osianama.com/artists/ m-f-husain