Always a modernist

Maqbool Fida Husain once said,“I only know seven colours.” But the contours of those colours — the haldi yellow of his horses and the ochre of his nudes — were entirely his. He was part of the Bombay Progressive Artists Group which rebelled against the rustic placidity and the stylised nationalism of the Bengal School of Art,but even in that brash collective of mavericks his canvases stood apart. His works brought together the audacity and agility of cubism with the easy familiarity of folk and classical images to create art that both appealed to and was accessible to people. In Husain,high and pop art collapsed in the most entertaining way. If nobody in modern Indian art took their works to the masses the way Husain did,it could be because of his backstory. The former painter of Hindi film hoardings knew the absolute delight afforded by popular art. In that ingenuity,his oils sold for millions of dollars and,along with the Razas and the Souzas,created a buzz about Indian art before The Buzz about Indian art began.

Husain was,at many levels,our most colourful modernist. It was not just the images he created on canvases,but the image that he constructed of himself — the barefoot painter who walked down Bombay’s streets,who drew on paper napkins and cafeteria walls in return for a coffee or a biryani,the performance artist who painted canvases in minutes before a gathering,gawping crowd. He was not the reclusive artist who hid in his studio; sometimes he towered so much over his canvases that he gained criticism for being more gimmicky than genius. But he continually engaged with public spaces and personalities and sporadically with that most engaging medium of the 20th century — the cinema.

If Husain’s horses collected fans,his fetishisation of the feminine got curiously diverse responses. It ranged a full spectrum — from sombreness for Mother Teresa to hilarity for Madhuri Dixit. And then there were his nude goddesses and Bharat Mata,which gathered controversies and court cases that eventually hounded him out of the country. He became,unfortunately,another totem of the modern times — our artist in exile — first living between Dubai and London,and then last year accepting the citizenship of Qatar. Then we collectively failed as an audience. Husain’s leaving revealed our shortcomings,reservations and prejudices — not his. Husain’s leaving was his final act of defiance,and it stood,as every brushstroke of his did,for his art.