I have tried to capture in my paintings what her presence meant to the destitute and the dying, the light and hope she brought by mere inquiry, by putting her hand over a child abandoned in the street… That is why I try it again and again, after a gap of time, in a different medium.”
The late celebrated artist M F Husain (1913- 2011) had a long association with Bangalore and had built a studio in Koramangala. The land was given to him by the government during Ramakrishna Hegde’s tenure as chief minister. The artist was very visible in the city in the 90s and was closely associated with Sara Abraham of Kala Yatra and artist G S Shenoy among others.
Husain’s studio-gallery was called Husain Sankalana. He had activated the space with art exhibitions, book readings, music performances and film screenings. Artist Gurudas Shenoy was the curator of Husain Sankalana and continued to keep it open till 2007. Currently, the house has been sold and turned into a restaurant, erasing an important part of the history of a celebrated artist and his connection to the city. Koramangala has seen a transformation from a residential layout to a commercial hub and this change is inevitable.
One of Husain’s obsessions was with the image of Mother Teresa. He used the iconography of Pieta of Michelangelo. Pieta shows the Virgin Mary holding the dead body of Christ after his crucifixion, death, and removal from the cross, but before he was placed in the tomb. This was a special work of art even in the Renaissance because at that time, multi-figured sculptures were rare. These two figures are carved so as to appear in a unified composition which forms the shape of a pyramid, something that other Renaissance artists also favoured.
Husain’s 2005 canvas of Mother Teresa, in the classical posture of La Pieta, was an image that was a recurring motif in his career. He was haunted by the iconic image in Rome, and after he met Mother Teresa, the series unfolded into an obsession. He said, “I call her the eternal figure, she was the modern Madonna, who embraced the poor and the destitute as her own; for me, she is a timeless figure.
I will never get tired of painting her.” Maqbool Fida Husain was born in 1913 in Pandharpur, Maharashtra. A self-taught artist, he came to Mumbai in 1937, determined to become a painter. In 1948, he was invited by F N Souza to join the Progressive Artists ‘ Group. Husain’s name has become almost synonymous with modern Indian art, for no single artist has popularised Indian art, within the country or internationally, as Husain has done. His endless quest for his cultural roots and a fearlessly open-minded willingness to absorb diverse influences has made M F Husain one of the most recognisable figures of modern Indian art.
“Mother Teresa was a true reflection of love for humanity. She was the greatest soul dedicated to humanity of all time. She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979. After that, I began to paint Mother Teresa, for all 25 years. Maa Yoshoda was the foster mother of Krishna, in the same way Mother Teresa was the adoptive mother of the world. My works are a tribute to Mother, who said: ‘Give until it hurts’. ” So said Husain, unveiling his portrait of Mother Teresa at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London on June 30, 2010.
The figure of a dying youth lying across the lap of a faceless nun echoes the Lamentation, where the figure of a dead Christ is cradled in the lap of his mother, the Virgin Mary. He was a great admirer of Mother Teresa, to whom he devoted a famous series of paintings. For Husain, gods, saints, martyrs and sages represented the highest level of human evolution as possible amplifications of the individual self. In this context, he frequently quoted Mother Teresa as a symbol of the ethical possibilities of compassion and altruism.
“Art is the portrait of a life that gives us peace, and a feeling of fullness. My effort is to pay a tribute to Mother and to her great love and tenderness towards the poor. And also I want to help raise awareness of the Missionaries of Charity in Kolkata, how they help the orphans, the elderly, AIDS patients, the dying and as they recover prostitutes from prison and give food to the hungry,” said Husain. The artist made a series of paintings to celebrate the beatification of Mother Teresa in Bombay, on October 18, 2003, and even a “Mother Teresa Series,” whose colours – white and blue – immediately recall the religious. Most of these paintings feature the Mother with a small child playing in her lap, and another nearby.
Many of his mythic figures were nude or semi-nude female figures and they were depicted as divine epic characters in his distinguished modernist signature style. Husain’s representation of the female body was more sensuous and referred to Indian sculpture than the erotic Romantic realism of Ravi Verma and calendar art.
He will also go down in history as the most unjustly hounded artist, who upset the Brahminical hierarchy of representation. The artist’s freedom to adapt the epics,myths of a civilisation and celebrate the nation in its secular diversity was questioned. Husain can be related to the variations of the Nehruvian India that the nostalgists would associate with a golden age of cultural pluralism, inclusivism and secularism that began to unravel, especially from the later 1980s with the resurgence of religious, especially Hindu nationalism.
Husain’s obsession with the female form is legendary. It was central to Husain’s work. He celebrated the rural farmer, mortal icons from reality like Indira Gandhi as Durga and the sensuous Nartaki in Madhuri Dixit. He painted Indira Gandhi as Durga, Madhuri Dixit as Gajagamini. But his yearning for his own mother led him to celebrate Saint Teresa in the emotions of “Karuna and Vatsalya”.It is here we see Husain as a celebrated modernist who played with form like a contemporary folk artist, transforming the ordinary into the epic.
(This appeared in Bangalore Mirror on Sept. 12. Suresh Jayaram is a visual artist,curator and art historian; his column features perspectives on the Arts)