indian picaso.com...........................Calling Husain a "world renowned artist", President Pratibha Patil said his "extraordinary style made him a celebrity in his own right in the arena of contemporary painting," adding that he was "a man of multi-dimensional talent, and his death would create a deep void in the world of art and creativity."...............................................................Ravichand Vidampally - Self taught artist Sculptor. Email : remixartist.com@gmail.com
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India's most highly prized artist MF Husain dies aged 95
MF Husain spoke to the BBC at his home in Dubai, shortly before his death
'Picasso of India'
One of India's most famous artists, MF Husain, has died in hospital in London aged 95 after years of self-imposed exile.
He had been unwell for several months.
Maqbool Fida Husain was India's most highly prized - and perhaps most controversial - painter and his work sold for millions of dollars.
His paintings of nude Hindu goddesses angered hardline Hindus who accused him of obscenity. He left India in 2006 and took up Qatari nationality in 2010.
Mr Husain has also made two Bollywood films, although both failed at the box office.
The maverick artist was often called the "Picasso of India" and influenced a whole generation of artists in the country.
'Never aged'
With flowing white hair and long beard, he was known to walk barefoot at social gatherings.
Leading Indian artist Anjolie Ela Menon said that Mr Husain's "enormous body of work is matched by Pablo Picasso's body of work".
"Husain never aged. He retained his energy, humour and his amazing capacity to work. He was restless, often saying he never had a bedroom in which he slept. He was a nomad, a gypsy," Ms Menon said.
Art critic S Kalidas said Mr Husain was painting until two weeks before his death, and led a "full life".
"He could paint anywhere - on the streets, in the studio. He was colourful, agile in mind and body. He was a fast thinking and fast painting man. I have never seen anybody paint so fast," he said.
Mr Husain's career was marked by controversy when he was accused of obscenity and denounced by hardline Hindus for a painting of a nude goddess.
His exhibitions were often attacked by hardline Hindu groups.
In 2006, Mr Husain publicly apologised for his painting, Mother India. It shows a nude woman kneeling on the ground creating the shape of the Indian map.
He also promised to withdraw the controversial painting from a charity auction.
In 2008, India's Supreme Court refused to launch criminal proceedings against Mr Husain saying that his paintings were not obscene and nudity was common in Indian iconography and history.
Indian artist M F Husain dies in London
MUMBAI: India’s most famous modern artist M.F. Husain, who left the state in 2006 due to threats from Hindu extremist, died on Thursday in London, media reports said citing family members.
Husain, who was aged 95 and known as the “Picasso of India”, died at the Royal Brompton hospital in London, the Press faith of India news agency said.
Indian television news channels reported he had suffered a heart attack and lung failure.
“India didn’t have the privilege of seeing him in his last minute, that is a huge loss for this country,” Jitish Kallat, one of India’s leading young artists, told NDTV news.
“As an artist several decades younger than him, I feel like a part of the awning has blown off,” he said. “He evolved the public notion of what it meant to be an artist in this country.”
Maqbool Fida Husain, a Muslim formerly based in Mumbai, was blame by Hindu hardliners of insulting their faith for portraying goddesses in the nude in some of his paintings — a depiction that he said symbolised purity.
Following threats by a radical Hindu group that offered a reward of millions of dollars for his death and thousands of legal cases filed against him for offending “Hindu sentiment,” he moved to Qatar in 2006 and accepted Qatari citizenship in 2010.
In 2008, Husain’s works were attacked by members of the Bajrang Dal, a right-wing Hindu group, at an event in New Delhi — the same year that one of his picture, influenced by a Hindu epic, fetched $1.6 million at Christie’s South Asian Modern and Contemporary Art sale.
When he accepted Qatari citizenship last year, Husain said he had selected to go into exile to be able to paint in peace instead of living in fear over death threats from Hindu fanatics.
“At the age of 40, I would have fought them tooth and nail but I just wanted to concentrate only on my work. I don’t want any disturbances,” he said in an interview.
He said he was content to be a non-resident Indian and that he had no qualms about losing his nationality, as India does not allow dual citizenship.
“What’s citizenship? It’s just a piece of paper,” he said. “where I find love I will accept it.
“Ninety-nine per cent of Indian people loved me and they still love me. I’m an Indian-origin painter. I will stay so to my last breath,” he said.
The Indian government had recently tried to draw him back to his native country, with home secretary G.K. Pillai pledge to provide adequate security to protect him.
indian picaso- Telegraph
The artist, whose full name was Maqbool Fida Husain but who was popularly known as “MF”, began his career in the 1940s as a poster artist for the Bollywood film industry. He rose to prominence after Independence and was later hailed as “India’s Picasso”. His paintings and drawings are eagerly sought by India’s new rich, and in 2005 he became the first living Indian artist to command $1 million for a painting. In early 2008, his Battle of Ganga and Jamuna: Mahabharata 12, a large diptych, fetched $1.6 million, setting a world record at a sale of South Asian Modern and Contemporary Art at Christie’s, New York.
MF Hussain 2
Indian artist M.F Husain poses in front of one of his paintings in Raan bar at the O2 Arena on 3 July 2007 in London
Husain was a master of vibrant colour and dynamic movement, and his boldly-drawn, figurative compositions, often featuring horses or women, bore the clear influence of artists such as Chagall and Kandinsky, but combined western modernism with classical Indian folk art traditions. In India no fewer than four museums are dedicated to his work and, though less well known outside India, from the 1950s his work was widely exhibited in Europe and America. In 2008 the Serpentine Gallery included several of his paintings in an exhibition of modern Indian artists.
Husain’s reputation was undoubtedly enhanced by his striking, ascetic looks and his mild eccentricity. With his free-flowing white beard and hair, unshod feet peeping out beneath impeccably-tailored Hermes suits, and “baton” (an oversized paintbrush modelled on a type devised by Matisse), he cut an instantly recognisable figure in India’s art world. His gentle, softly-spoken, watchful manner commanded attention and respect.
In India, he was seldom out of the news. There was a story of how once, being chauffeured to the airport to catch an international flight from Calcutta, he suddenly ordered his driver to pull over. Stepping from the car, Husain settled himself under a nearby tree for a relaxing afternoon nap. Duly missing his flight, he returned to Calcutta, apparently unperturbed. Throughout the Nineties, Indian public life was enlivened by accounts of his obsession with the Bollywood star Madhuri Dixit (aka India’s “Oomph Queen’’), whom he adopted as his muse and featured in a film, Gaja Gamini, which he financed himself to the tune of £2 million.
Husain travelled lightly, leading a peripatetic, gipsy life, albeit one conducted on international airlines and in luxury hotels. (“My tastes are very simple”, he explained, quoting Churchill. “I’m merely satisfied by the best”.) He did not have a studio, preferring to paint in whichever hotel he happened to be staying in, spattering the carpet and furnishings with paint and settling the bill later.
His standing in India was such that in 1986 the Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi nominated him to the upper house of the Indian Parliament, the Rajya Sabha, where he dutifully attended sessions for six years without uttering a single word. But not everyone was a fan.
A secular Muslim, Husain found himself a pawn in the confessional arms race that gripped Indian politics in the mid-1990s, attacked by Hindu militants after a series of his paintings of the Hindu goddesses Durga and Saraswati, as he put it, “clothed only by sky”, were reprinted in a Hindi magazine underneath the headline “MF Husain: A Painter or Butcher”. Demonstrations were held in Mumbai, and his exhibitions, home and workshop were attacked. Hardline groups, including the Bajrang Dal, a militant wing of the Bharatiya Janata party, demanded he be prosecuted.
Despite his supporters pointing out that nudity, not to speak of graphic sex, had long been a part of the representation of Hindu divinity, and that much of the artwork that was causing such controversy had been painted in the 1970s, for eight years Husain was obliged to fight a series of criminal charges in the Indian courts. The charges were finally quashed in 2004, but the furore refused to die down, and in 2006 he moved to Dubai after receiving death threats from Hindu extremists when Bharatmata (Mother India), a nude painting of a woman shaped like the map of India, was reproduced in India Today.
The son of an accountant, Maqbool Fida Husain was born in Pandharpur, Maharashtra state, on September 17 1915. His mother, Zunaib, died when he was just 18 months old. She was never photographed nor painted, and he had no memory of her face. As he later explained to Mick Brown in an interview in The Daily Telegraph, it was for this reason that he never painted the faces of the women he depicted.
At the age of 19, Husain left home to make his fortune in Bombay (Mumbai). Sleeping on the pavement, he found work as a “graphics wallah’’, painting huge, vibrantly-coloured posters advertising Hindi films for six annas per square foot.
He got his first break in 1947 when his paintings were exhibited at the Bombay Art Society, and in the same year he became one of the founder-members of the Progressive Artists Group, headed by Francis Newton Souza, which, post-Independence, set out to forge a new visual language for Indian painting, casting off what it saw as the nationalist legacy of the older Bengal school.
Husain quickly became the most popular painter in India, known particularly in the early part of his career for his dramatic depictions of galloping horses. Later on, as well as his depictions of the Bollywood star Dixit, at the other end of the spectrum of Indian womanhood he executed numerous paintings of Mother Teresa in her distinctive blue and white cowl.
He also made several films, of which his first, Through the Eyes of a Painter (1967), won a Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival.
After leaving India for Dubai, Husain divided his time between the Middle Eastern emirate and London. Last year he announced that he had been “honoured [with] Qatari nationality” and had renounced his Indian citizenship.
In exile, Husain threw his energies into two new projects, one that focused on the history of Indian culture and a second, commissioned by the wife of the Emir of Qatar for a museum in Doha, that examined the history of Arab civilisation.
Even in exile, however, Husain found it difficult to avoid trouble. In 2006 a show of his work at Asia House in London was cancelled for “security reasons” after the gallery was deluged with letters, phone calls and emails complaining that Husain’s “so-called art” offended the “sentiments of the Hindu community of the UK”.
Husain’s wife Fazila predeceased him and he is survived by their six children.
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