S.Kalidas' Archive

M F Husain: Relentless Iconist

By S.Kalidas

Even before you have met him or seen his resplendent (and highly priced) works­­— be they on canvas, paper, metal— you have heard legends about his life, loves, antics, skirmishes and triumphs. Reams of print have chronicled his barefoot stylish stance, his unabashed love for (and celebration of) the feminine form, his disappearing acts, his unforeseen arrivals, his quicksilver wit, his painting of horses and his paintings on horses. To confound or to confuse, or merely to suit the need of the moment, he enjoys playing many roles—the artist, the buffoon, the patriarch, the fakir. 

When you do encounter the silver-maned superstar of Indian art, what strikes you most is his indomitable spirit and indefatigable energy. As he steps into his 90^th year, Maqbool Fida Husain, easily the tallest iconist of our times, packs the panache of a Picasso and the drama of a Dali in his trim, lithe frame.      

           

On an overcast morning in Mumbai, I venture out to seek the man behind the enigma. The day’s DNA has announced that the master is not entertaining the press or the public on his birthday, just two days away. “Just a family dinner at a venue to be decided on the spur of the moment,” said the report quoting his elder daughter Raeesa. However, bigger celebrations are in store. Beginning with Singapore on October 4, the grapevine informs a host of exhibitions is being planned across the country slated for later in the year.

Theatre director Nadira Babbar is said to be working on a play to be culled from his absolutely riveting autobiography M F Husain Ki Kahani, Apni Zubaani (The M F Husain story, in his own words). While at least one big Bollywood producer is believed to be interested in making a feature film based on it, Husain has his own plans too.

Husain is notorious for not keeping appointments. This son of a factory timekeeper is never fettered by the hands of the clock.  I am apprehensive as I approach the Kohinoor Empress, a tall pencil shaped apartment building just off Worli Naka where we are to meet. The lift stops on the second floor and facing me is a large canvas in the familiar signature style on one wall of the narrow corridor. On the other, is a shoe rack with three or four pairs of sundry footwear. This is just one of many homes spread around the globe that the gypsy-at-heart painter might use as night shelter, if he happens to be in the vicinity. Otherwise, it serves as home to his younger daughter Aqeela. M F Husain does not have a permanent address.

In his bedroom-cum-studio, Husain sahab, is at his sprightly best. He is surrounded by his latest set of serigraphs inspired by Nagesh Kukunoor’s Iqbal. He is completely smitten by the film, and wants to cast the lead actor Sheryas Talpade, as the young Husain in an autobiographical film. As India Today photographer, Bhaskar Paul, asks him pose for photographs, he opens his wardrobe and exults, “Let me put on something special. Look what they gave me for my birthday!” He brings out an exquisite Mughal choga (gown), very finely embroidered with motifs from his own paintings and a verse from the Urdu poet Mirza Ghalib. The robe took six months to finish and is a present from his admirers in Pakistan. His glee at receiving the gift is infectious and I read out the lines inscribed on it: “Hai kahan tamanna ka doosara qadam yaarab, Hamne to dashq-e-imqan ko naqsh-e-pa paya (Where does ambition cast its next step, dear friend, I found a forest of desires in but a foot print).”  When people compliment him on his zest for life, he says, “I was a late beginner in the voyage of desires, so I conserved my energy.”

A fast and prodigious painter, Husain has reputedly painted over 25,000 paintings over 70 odd years. “Yet, I feel that is not even ten percent of what I have bubbling inside me,” he asserts. He paints compulsively and furiously, anywhere and everywhere. Art galleries, cinema houses, public platforms and friends’ homes-- Husain has painted in all of them and painted them all as well. One well-known Delhi journalist postponed vacating her rented flat for years giving the plea that Husain had painted her bedroom wall and the worth of that was greater than the price of the appartment. For Husain the act of painting is fulfilling in itself. “I am not afraid to confront my weaknesses in public. I do not need to isolate my self in an ivory tower to paint like some painters do. I like to paint in front of people. Like a musician, I can concentrate in the midst of a crowd and also communicate with them in the process,” he says. The boot of his Mercedes S 350 always has some canvas, paper, paint and brushes tucked away for such creative emergencies. “These can easily fit into my jhola (cloth bag), too, and I could leave for New York with nothing else,” he assures me.

Husain is believed to have developed this capacity to be able to concentrate amid chaos during his long years of struggle when he painted cinema hoardings to eke out a precarious living. He tells you about the time when he painted 40 foot hoardings for four annas a foot under the blazing sun in the open foot path in front of Badar Bagh, a chawl in central Mumbai where he lived for many years. From painting hoardings he progressed to designing toys and painting children’s furniture for Rs 300 a month. “But even at that time I knew that time I would be an artist one day,” he says, adding, “There was a time when I painted furniture by day and my own art by night. I painted non stop.”

The times started to change slowly around the time of Independence. Francis Newton Souza (1924-2002), the enfant terrible of Sir JJ School of Art, spotted Husain painting away one day by chance and immediately included him in his Progressive Artists Group (PAG). The PAG entered the art world with the manifesto of aspiring to overthrow the reign of the second hand European academic realists a la Raja Ravi Varma on one hand and the “wishy washy Indianism” of the Bengal School on the other. The PAG held its first group show in 1947 and Husain’s work was noticed right from that first show. On the encouragement of Rudi von Leyden, the German Jewish émigré who served as the art critic for The Times of India, he held his first one-man show in Mumbai in 1950. With prices ranging from Rs 50 to Rs 300 the show sold out. Husain chuckles, “I was a best seller right from start.”

What differentiates Husain from his PAG contemporaries is his deeply rooted ‘Indianness’ and his celebration of life and people. Whereas Souza and Raza were busily assimilating European art from Byzantium downwards, Husain sought out his sources in the temple sculptures (Mathura and Khajuraho), Pahari miniature paintings and Indian folk art. “Although I owed my initial understanding of European art greatly to Souza, I also realised one did not have to paint or think like Europeans to be modern,” he says. Nor did he, at any time, understand the angst of existentialism. “Alienation as a concept is alien to my nature,” he maintains. In the mid-1950s Husain got national recognition with two very special canvases Zameen and Between the Spider and the Lamp. Zameen, which won the first prize at the first National Art Exhibition in ’55, was inspired by Bimal Roy’s Do Bigha Zameen. But instead of bemoaning rural poverty and indebtedness, it presents a symbolic celebration of life in rural India with a vibrancy that had never been seen before.

The next year he painted a more enigmatic work and cryptically called it Between the Spider and the Lamp. This picture features five women reminiscent of ancient Indian sculpture with an oil lamp hanging from the top of canvas and some unintelligible words in a script that looks like ancient Sanskrit or Magadhi or some long forgotten dialect. From the hand of one woman, painted as if frozen in a mudra (ritualistic gesture), hangs a large spider by its thread. Some critics have alluded the women as pancha kanyas (Ahalya, Kunti, Draupadi, Tara, Mandodari) of Hindu mythology. When this painting was first shown, despite the ripples it created, no one came forth to buy it for Rs 800. Now Husain would not part with it for any price. A living icon of Hindu-Muslim, ganga-jamni culture, Husain’s art is quintessentially Indian in form and content and yet fully global in its relevance and appeal.

As modern Indian art gained wider acceptance through the ’60s and the ’70s Husain was steadily scaling up his prices and using the media to create hype around his colourful persona and his escapades. “Life without drama is too drab,” he is wont to say. Detractors screamed hoarse and friends frowned in exasperation. “When I hiked up my prices to over a lakh, one of my closest friends Tyeb Mehta said I was finished as a painter,” he shrugs, adding, “The fiscal worth of a painting is in the eyes of the buyer.” And buyers came in droves to Husain. From Badri Vishal Pitti, a Hyderabad businessman for whom he painted 150 paintings based on the Ramayana at the behest of the late Ram Manohar Lohia, to Chester Herwitz a handbag tycoon from Boston who bought up anything that Husain produced through the ’70s. The latest in this list is the Kolkata industrialist G S Srivastava who has reputedly struck a deal for 124 Husain paintings for Rs 100 crores. Srivastava has done so not for the love of art but on the advice of an investment banker who convinced him that Indian art was appreciating at a higher rate than most stocks. M F Husain the brand is now Husain Inc. Despite all his celebrity and wealth Husain, is personally untouched by both. “He can be as comfortable in a dhaba dipping his roti in a glass of tea as in a five star relishing an expensive meal,” says the veteran painter Ram Kumar.

No success story is ever smooth or without blemish. And Husain has had more than his share of controversies and brickbats. Many artists accuse him of commercialising art at worst and wasting his creative energies in stunts and gimmicks at best. Then there was the instance of depicting Indira Gandhi as Bharat Mata during the Emergency which made Husain look like a political stooge. But his main antagonists have been from the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh who vandalized his paintings and threatened his life for having painted the goddess Saraswati in nude. Husain reportedly apologized for the hurt caused and the controversy died its natural death. Seeing LK Advani face similar ire from the same people over his Jinnah remarks might bring some solace to the bemused painter, but today, Husain brushes these criticisms off with a shrug of his still broad and straight shoulders. “I hold nothing against my critics. But, I do not feel the need to respond to them,” he says.

At present he is too busy planning his fourth film (see box), preparing for future exhibitions, traveling and searching for a new muse. He meets them by the droves at every crossroad he says. As I prepare to wind up the interview he recites a poem he wrote four decades ago:

“As I begin to paint,

Hold the sky in your hands

As the stretch of my canvass

Is unknown to me”

With a flick of his long brush he waves me adieu. 

Husain the Wealth Creator 

MF Husain’s father worked as a timekeeper and accountant all his life but dreamed of becoming a businessman. “He would buy ‘How to Become a Businessman’ books and make my uncle try his hand at one business after another. But invariably the ventures failed,” recalls Husain. But his son did not do badly when it came to marketing his art. Combining his charisma with his painterly talent, Husain learnt early how to find promoters and win the attention of buyers. What is more, he created collectors out of the innocent rich looking to acquire class or prestige. This is corroborated by India’s first professional art gallery owner Kekoo Gandhy, of Mumbai’s Chemould Gallery. In his memoirs Gandhy says: “At our first Husain exhibition, I looked out of the window and saw my wife’s uncle passing by. I just pulled him in and said we needed a crowd. The poor man had no idea what was going on. But Husain sold so well that we were flooded with work from artists from all over the India. After that exhibition, our sales fo frames and art shot up from Rs 5000 per year to rs 20,000 per year.” Gandhy was in the business of manufacturing picture frames, so it made sense to start an art gallery as well.

Husain is a firm proponent of the gallery system even today when he, as the biggest brand in Indian art, no longer needs galleries to promote him. Over the decades he not only made established galleries make good money, but also helped set up new galleries all over the country. When he tired of Chemould in 1968, he helped a watch seller by the name of Kali Pundole to open a gallery at Flora Fountain.Today the Pundole Gallery is run by Kali’s son Dadibhai, who also represents Sothebys in India. In Delhi he shifted from the Dhoomimals in Connaught Place to support Virender Kumar with his Kumar Gallery that started in a loft and then later shifted to the rich neighborhood of Sundar Nagar. Over the decades, it was Husain who upped and upped the prices of his paintings much to the mirth of gallery owners and the chagrin of his contemporaries who accused him of turning too commercial. It is another matter that many of these artists would bank on Husain to find them buyers when their works did not sell. And magnanimously, Husain invariably obliged.

Going by today’s prices an average Husain painting fetches anything between 75 Lakh to 2 crores. “Multiply that by half the number of oils he has painted – say ten thousand—and you begin to get an idea of the wealth he has created,” says Arun Vadehra of the Vadehra Gallery and representative of the Christies in India.

Love of Cinema 

Cinema has been M F Husain’s biggest passion after painting. Right from the time when he saw his first silent movie to the time he saw Ham Aapke hain Kaun a record 65 times and then followed it by making Gajagamini, a cinematic ode to womanhood in the person of Madhuri Dikshit. In fact he says that the only silver lining during the time he painted cinema hoardings for Bollywood producers was that he would get to watch some shooting to sketch the lead stars of the day. Today, after having made his third film Menaxi- a tale of three cities, he calls cinema the highest form of art: “Cinema has everything—form, movement, space and time.” 

But Husain’s entree as a director was sheerly by chance. In 1967, the Government of India decided to bring in two advisors for its Films Division (FD). The new advisors-- Jahangir Bhowanagary from Paris and the Canadian James Beveridge-- decided to bring a sea change in the way FD developed projects. Bhowanagary had made documentaries on Indian art earlier, and they decided to get a short film made by Husain. The rest of the FD was not very happy with the fact that Husain had been assigned such a project, but Husain went ahead with his usual gusto. The result was Through The Eyes Of A Painter a black and white short film shot in Rajasthan.

According to veteran director Mrinal Sen, after the film was completed, it baffled most people at the FD. Sen did not know Husain at that point and was himself skeptical about it, given that filmmaking is a hugely technical exercise that Husain had no knowledge of. “As chance would have it, I was in Bombay the day the final print came out. So I decided to see the film myself,” recalls Sen. The film was a documentary on how an artist goes to Rajasthan to paint and the visual impulses he records. Sen recalls coming out of the auditorium, his eyes moist, and saying, “After watching this film I liked Rajasthan a lot more than I had ever did.” He set about writing a letter to the Films Division explaining why the film was so remarkable. As luck would have it, the film was sent to Berlin that year, and won the Silver Bear, the best short film award.

“I wouldn’t say it was a perfect film but it was certainly a work of art. There were times when Husain had been pretentious, times when some things were over the top. But every frame of the film was like an artist’s canvas,” says Sen. He hadn’t even met Husain then.

Later that year, Sen received an invitation from Films Division to celebrate the film’s winning the award and he met Husain for the first time. “We have remained friends since. Every time he makes a film, he shows it to me. I have liked them in bits and pieces. Some frames have stuck in my mind. But overall, none of his films have been able to reach the remarkable quality of his first film,” says the filmmaker.

Be as that may, Sen shall have one more Husain film to watch soon. Never one to give up a good thing easily, Husain is now planning to render his autobiography in celluloid and wants the Shreyas Talpade the actor in Nagesh Kukunoor’s Iqbal to play the role.