The street as studio

FEW modern artists carried the imprint of the street into the rarefied world of galleries with as much authority as Maqbool Fida Husain. To understand Husain is to begin not in the studio, but at the traffic junction amid the clamour of mid-century Mumbai where he painted cinema hoardings at a scale designed to arrest the distracted eye.

This was not merely an apprenticeship; it was a training in spectacle. The billboard demands immediacy: bold contour, compressed narrative, and an instinct for visual drama. Husain never quite relinquished these instincts. Even at his most sophisticated, his canvases retain the urgency of something meant to be seen in passing grasped in a moment, yet lingering long after.

When he joined the Progressive Artists’ Group in 1947, alongside figures such as FN Souza and SH Raza, Husain became part of a generation intent on forging a modern visual language for a newly independent India. Their project was neither derivative of European modernism nor beholden to revivalist classicism. Husain, in particular, understood that modernity in India would not be found in polite restraint, but in excess of colour, of movement, of myth.

His work is often described as a fusion of the classical and the contemporary, but this risks understating its radicalism. Husain did not so much reinterpret the Mahabharata or Ramayana as re-stage them for a mass visual culture. His figures – fractured, elongated, frequently faceless – move across the canvas with a cinematic sweep. One senses the lingering influence of the hoarding: narrative distilled into emblem, gesture heightened to the point of archetype.

There is also, in Husain, an unapologetic embrace of the popular. He painted film stars, horses, goddesses, and the nation itself with equal conviction, collapsing distinctions between the sacred and the everyday. If the European avant-garde often defined itself against mass culture, Husain absorbed it. The result is a body of work that feels at once immediate and elusive, accessible in its imagery, yet resistant in its meaning.

His foray into cinema with ‘Through the Eyes of a Painter’, awarded at the Berlin International Film Festival, only reinforced this sensibility. The film, like his paintings, privileges the fragment over the whole, the fleeting image over the fixed narrative. It is less a story than a way of seeing.

Yet Husain’s career also exposes the fault lines of the culture he helped define. The controversies that engulfed him in later life particularly over his depictions of religious figures speak to a society increasingly uneasy with ambiguity and artistic licence. That he spent his final years in exile is a stark reminder that modernism, in India as elsewhere, has never been entirely secure.

What remains, however, is the work itself: restless, expansive, and unmistakably public. Husain did not retreat into the privacy of the studio; he enlarged it, turning the canvas into a kind of open arena where mythology, cinema, and modern life collide.

For all his international acclaim, he was never entirely absorbed into the polite circuits of global art. There is, in his best work, a refusal of refinement and a persistence of the billboard’s brash clarity. It is precisely this quality that gives Husain his enduring force. He reminds us that modern art need not whisper to be taken seriously; it can, instead, command attention as it once did on the streets, large, insistent, and impossible to ignore.