Husain: Portrait of an artist
Author- Ila Pal
Publisher- HarperCollins, Rs 699
In her book Husain: Portrait of an Artist, Ila Pal describes the maverick from the eyes of an art student who saw him as someone who liked to be around people, felt for them, and was even inspired by them. Here is an edited excerpt:
In September 1993, MF Husain underwent a major surgery in the Bombay Hospital. The same evening there was an earthquake in latur. Seeing the video footage of the destruction and death on the television, Husain was so anguished he ordered a huge canvas to be brought to his hospital room, not to speak of many smaller ones. The arrival of the canvas into his hospital suite left the hospital staff and the doctors aghast and the nurses attending on him wary of this abnormal sight. At night, no sooner than they all cleared out than, he propped the canvas on the window sill and was unstoppable till he had finished painting the canvas.
Cancer, tuberculosis, pneumonia, open-heart surgery — he defied each of the deadly debilitating diseases and forged ahead. He was deeply aware that he was a mere mortal and that ‘in the flow of time stretching into millenniums, it is foolish to think of immortality’. Yet why did he work ceaselessly and obsessivelyIJ
It is simply because Husain knew no other way of living. He was impacted by triumphs and tragedies of this earth and was unwilling to let those pass him by. He had imagination, inventiveness and the confidence that whatever the enormity of the impact, he would not be mastered by it; that the experience would get transformed in a way that it would be ‘life confronting life on its own ground and animated by the ever-rolling stream of time’. Doubtlessly he was conscious of his stature and an extraordinary command over the medium. like a magician, he could pull out ‘from his pocket’ mythology and history, both contemporary and ancient India in a matter of minutes, have apsaras, Gandhi and Einstein descend on his canvas. This must undisputedly give that certitude and swagger to be able to say, ‘let history cut across me without me.’
In the process had he lost his humilityIJ I don’t think so. It was an integral part of his mental make-up. I remember what had happened many decades ago when we had gone for the sketching tour of Rajasthan.
Unlike many artists, he did not live in a cloistered world inhabited by him and his art. He sought exposure to creative minds all over the world and reached out to them with a genuine desire to learn.
A great admirer of Satyajit Ray, he made a series of paintings based on his films. I would like to quote the following lines from a letter written by Husain to Satyajit Ray when he interpreted his films, during the week he spent in Pune: ‘I have chosen six of your films to be interpreted on my canvasses. Format, not of easel painting but of cinema hoarding, 8 feet by 15 feet each. Hope my brush will not fail to touch the feet of your creative heights.’ Those words reflect the humility he possessed.
Husain knew that neither he nor his art would survive if he were isolated. He was in love with life. The people who inhabited this earth were his oxygen, vital for his survival. The relationships he nurtured over the years and continued to build were precious to him; they enriched him, helped him understand life; lend meaning to his wanderings. life was still an enigma and as he enacted his him from turning into a self-absorbed savage that he could have become.
One cannot help but think of Picasso at this point, role on this vast stage of life, he still felt the tearing excitement of learning. He was keen student and it was that which saved who cut himself off from the world to live with his demons and Minotaur, the only human contact being Jacqueline, his last wife, who had so imprisoned herself in the world of Picasso that she put a revolver to her head and killed herself the day after he died. That is why I am forever surprised when Husain is likened to Picasso. Except for the fact that their output was astoundingly prodigious, and both worked unmindful of the circumstances in their life, I am unable to see too many similarities. The starkest difference in their lives was the way Picasso shunned people and Husain sought them.
While Picasso ensured that he was as far away from people, Husain loved their presence even when he painted, a very special ability he had developed while painting billboards. It was that which gave him a chance to judge the scale of what he was painting, something most painters find difficult to gauge from close. I am not aware of any painter in the world who has had to paint billboards. It was an opportunity that came inadvertently, but how godsend! Coming back to similarities, if any, these were few and far in between. If one is speaking of fame, it is doubtless that Husain was famous in India, in fact the only painter laymen knew of in India.
Excerpted from Ila Pal’s Husain: Portrait of an Artist published by HarperCollins, Rs 699