Indian art was going through a great transition during the post-colonial period. The artists were in quest of an indigenous tradition, wanting to escape from the British influence of academic painting under which they were reeling under then. It was at this time that the progressive artists held their first show in 1949. I would not single out Husain but he was certainly prominent in that group.
People were looking to puranas, the myths and to other indigenous roots. Husain incorporated into his paintings Indian idiom, inspiration and subject matter on to the canvas and presented it in modernist style and colours. It is an amalgamation of what is happening in the west in stylistic terms and of Indian subject matter. It was not a self-conscious attempt as it was in the case of the Shantiniketan group or the JJSchool of Art group.
There was spontaneity in Husain’s work. He moved from cinema hoardings to being India’s true modernist.
He absorbed western modernism at the visual level. I would say that he was not tremendously articulate in terms of ideas but in his canvases and the manner in which he articulated the western stylistic devices he was absolutely articulate. For instance, the idom of the leg with the foot missing is taken from Picasso and made his own. And so were his idea of the horse, of which he did so many paintings and drawings, borrowed from Picasso. The influence of Picasso was very clear in his work.
He loved myths but he presented them in the modern form. For example, he took the mythical figures like Sita and presented them in the abstract. Raja Ravi Varma’s Sita was draped in the style of the times in which Varma lived. He stripped the image of its orientation and made it modern. The various manifestations of mythology of the Kalighat school and later that of Ravi Varma were frozen at the moment when they were painted. Husain turned them into modernist form. Something like what Peter Brooks did with the Mahabharata, where Brooks went to the essence of the story and chipped away all the external forms.
Husain influenced an entire generation of Indian artists. The artist community understood what he was doing, but not many outside the artistic group were able to appreciate his work. He was esoteric in his approach to style. His detractors did not understand him. They did not understand art in the first place. He was not at all bitter about the protests against his paintings though there was one time what he said irritated me. He said that the artist community did not support him, which was not true. The artist community supported him all the time, ad nauseam.
I do not think it mattered to him where he lived. All that he wanted was a place to work in, where you could paint and where he could keep his bag of brushes and colours.
He was a nomad. He never stayed for long at any one place. He was extremely endearing at a personal level. He was 25 years older to my generation of painters, but it seemed that as we got older he became younger by the day. He had indefatigable energy. We watched him do the history of Indian films series. Then suddenly he would get into his red Ferrari and tell the driver to “vroom”! He would disappear even as we were in mid-sentence and go off to another place.
