This week we have a work that we have exhibited before, but which we’ve recently discovered new information about. (It also allows me to show off another recent find…)
Usually, this happens after we sell something, which is always frustrating, as you want to put as much on the table alongside a work of art. Context and history are such important factors and can dramatically alter the desirability of a work of art – a ‘Mullin’s Souza’, or anything from the Herwitz collection, are examples that spring to mind.
- Charles Moore
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Maqbool Fida Husain is a hugely important artist, and one of the most significant Indian modernists of the 20th century. Over the years we have dealt with a great many of his painting and drawings, and whilst this is a smaller canvas, it punches above its weight in terms of 'wall power'.
Head of a Horse was painted in the late 1960s, and depicts a subject that is synonymous with his career. Here, the animal’s head is isolated and held in stasis, the features exaggerated and teeth bared. The works comes from a period where the colours and subjects of Rajasthan were prevalent in his paintings. -
South Asian Modernists in Paris
Frieze Masters, 2024 -
The Gallery’s association with this painting goes back to 2007, when it came to us via Vadehra Art Gallery, and was sold to a client in London. We exhibited the work at Frieze Masters in 2024 as part of the exhibition ‘South Asian Modernists in Paris’, which included the work of Raza, Souza, Lain Bangdel, Zubeida Agha, Sadequain, amongst others.
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21 Years of Painting, M.F. Husain, Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai, Heaed of a Horse pictured -
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Here is part of Narayana Menon’s catalogue text:
…But these are the little episodes which make up the Husain legend. Fancy a painter who hasn't touched a camera making a film. Fancy a painter gate-crashing into the field of performing arts.
But the real legend is different. It is founded on hard work, humility, reticence, sensitiveness, guts, highly sensitive reflexes, good eyes, good steady hands, good ears, sharp observation, a retentive memory.
There are here and there, scars from the past, the pain of the present, the foreboding for the future. There are too, periods of uncertainty, of easy facility getting on top, overshadowing and drowning deeper values. But every creative artist has his ups and downs. There are conflicts which are resolved, others in the process of resolving, still others which will never be resolved.
But as W. B. Yeats said, conflict is energy and it is out of the conflict with oneself that art is born. Conflict with others, the outside world, only results in rhetoric.”
Narayana Menon, 5th March 1969 -
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Aside from this ‘new’ history, we recently found some wonderful old press photographs of Husain taken by Jitendra Arya in 1963. Arya was a significant photographer and in 2017 the subject an exhibition at the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) in Mumbai. Here is an article about that show along with some wonderful imagery.
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