Maqbool Fida Husain

Private Swiss Collection

Sotheby’s New York, Indian & Southeast Asian Art, 24 March 2010, Lot 142

‘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 amongst his grouped figures... It 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.’

(S. Kapur, Husain, Lalit Kala Akademi, 1961, p. iv)

With compressed perspective, fiery colours and angular shapes, this lot is a dynamic and atypical composition for Maqbool Fida Husain. The two figures inhabit in an imagined and suspended space. They exist within the same frame, but on diverging planes, and this spatial relationship contradicts traditional understandings of portraiture. The dominant colour of ebullient red is complemented by flashes of warm orange and contrasting hues of green and brown. The bodies fill the entire canvas and their positioning to one another illustrates the synchronicity and dissonance between man and woman.