In
2010, when MF Husain was conferred Qatar nationality, the artist acknowledged
it through a sketch that featured his trademark horse alongside words that
expressed how he was “honoured”. Seven years after the modernist’s demise in
2011, the country is now celebrating his art through an exhibition that
features his works spanning six decades. Taking place at the Mathaf: Arab
Museum of Modern Art in Qatar, curator Ranjit Hoskote describes the show titled
“MF Husain: Horses Of The Sun” as “an introspective rather than a
retrospective”. “The question before me was how to organise both the material
and the kaleidoscopic life of the artist into something that would be legible
to the diverse audience in Doha.
The
main thematic fulcrum for me was Husain’s understanding of himself as someone
who was profoundly rooted in India but also was a global nomad. He travelled
everywhere freely, and yet at the end he became an exile, having to leave his
homeland against his will. It was a very tragic turn of events,” says Mumbai-based
Hoskote. In curating the collection that features over 90 works, Hoskote
reflects on “home” and “belonging” — propelling viewers to examine Husain’s
numerous abodes and sentiments, through exhibits largely categorised into Bait,
Manzil and Dar. “These modes map the three lifelong and contending definitions
of home that I identify in his art. Bait is home as a place of intimacy,
ancestral memory and childhood. In Manzil, he is on a journey towards a larger
framework of belonging and knowledge.
Dar is the gateway, expanded sense of home
where I present his engagements with different media,” says Hoskote. Through
transitional zones, he presents the various engagements of the artist —
including his interest in literature. The floating wall text quotes from poets
Allama Iqbal and Makhdoom Mohiuddin, among others. “Husain was not confined to
a single art. He wrote in four languages. He was a poet himself and a reader of
poetry. He also wrote his memoirs,” says Hoskote. While chronologically the
display begins with his 1950 oil painting Dolls’ Wedding and ends with his 2011
work Husain and His Horse, rendered in expressionistic strokes using metallic
paint (painted less than a month before he passed away),
the
numerous works in between give a glimpse into Husain’s varied engagements, both
with medium and subject. If Bait has him revisit his early years in Pandharpur,
Indore and Sidhpur, it also features a series dedicated to Yemen, from where
his forefathers migrated to India. In a triptych, Husain celebrates the three
Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and another series of
lithographs is dedicated to the world religions, including Humanism. In Manzil
we see Last Supper in Red Desert, where the Indian modernist revisits Leonardo
da Vinci’s iconic work, introducing Arabic references. There is also a
lithographic series where he paints Hanuman and a suite of paintings
celebrating the achievements of mystics, philosophers and scientists, among
others.
