By Maria Bregman, writer, litarary and art critic
So, there are two auctions.
In New York, at Christie’s, a monumental painting by the late Indian artist M.F. Husain sells for nearly 14 million dollars. A new world record. The room, full of people who trade in culture for a living, bursts into spontaneous applause.
Three months later, in Mumbai, another auction of Husain’s work. This time, there are police. There are barricades. A right-wing Hindu nationalist group has threatened “strong public agitation” if the sale of these “vulgar and obscene” paintings goes ahead.
How do you square that? How can the same artist, in the same year, be the subject of a standing ovation in one room and a police cordon in another? What are we actually talking about when we talk about M.F. Husain?
The art market has its answer, of course. For them, it’s simple. Husain is “India’s Picasso”. He’s a blue-chip modernist. A safe bet. He’s historical, he’s important, he co-founded the influential Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group. He’s dead, which is always helpful for prices. The record-breaking sale isn’t a surprise; it’s an inevitability. It’s the market doing what the market does: turning a complicated life into a clean, upward-trending line on a graph.
But the police in Mumbai tell a different story.
They tell you that for a lot of people in his home country, Husain isn’t a celebrated modernist. He’s a provocateur. A blasphemer. A Muslim man who dared to paint nude Hindu goddesses. And more than a decade after his death, that anger is still there. It’s real. It’s not just art-world chatter. It’s visceral enough to make an auction house call the police.
So which is he? The pioneer or the pariah?
At first, I thought this was just another case of the art world feasting on controversy. An artist becomes notorious, dies in exile, and two decades later his notoriety becomes part of the sales pitch. The ‘rebel artist’ is a very marketable brand. But the more you look, the more it feels like the art itself is almost beside the point. The paintings have become a sort of screen onto which everyone projects their own anxieties.
It’s like clearing out your late grandmother’s house. You find an old, dusty painting in the attic. To the auctioneer you call, it’s a mid-century asset, its value determined by provenance and condition. To your cousin, it’s a treasured memory of childhood holidays. To the neighbour who always hated your grandmother, it’s an ugly piece of junk she should have thrown out years ago. The object is the same. The meaning is entirely in the eye of the beholder.
Husain’s paintings are that object. To the global art market, they are assets. To his supporters, they are symbols of a secular, modern India. To his detractors, they are weapons used in a cultural war.
The thing is, the controversy wasn’t always there. He painted many of these works in the 70s. The real trouble didn’t kick off until the 90s. And as one art historian points out, that’s no coincidence. It was a time when Hindu nationalism was on the rise in India. Suddenly, a painting that had been hanging quietly for twenty years became a lightning rod. The reception of Husain became a “litmus test for Indian cultural politics”. A way to take the temperature of the country.
And what was the man himself doing? He was trying to invent a new language. He and the other artists in the Bombay Progressive group were faced with a huge question after India’s independence in 1947: what does a modern Indian art look like? They didn’t want to just copy the Europeans, and they didn’t want to be stuck in some revivalist, nationalist past. So they grabbed bits from everywhere. Cubism, Indian folk traditions, the bright, flat colours of the Bollywood billboards Husain painted as a young man. It was a creative mash-up, a search for an identity.
He was a showman, too. The “barefoot artist”. He’d walk around with a long paintbrush like a cane. He painted live on stage. He was a celebrity. I’ve met a dozen people over the years, and none of them have a boring Husain story. He was a character. He built his own myth.
Did he enjoy the controversy? Some people say he was a contrarian. That he liked to provoke. I don’t doubt it. But could he have possibly anticipated the firestorm that would consume the last years of his life? The death threats, the legal cases, the arrest warrant that forced him to flee the country he so clearly loved? I find that hard to believe.
He died in London in 2011, a man in self-imposed exile who always talked of wanting to go home.
Now, Qatar is building a museum dedicated to his work. Christie’s is selling his canvases for millions. And in Mumbai, people are still angry enough to call the police.
So, what is his legacy? It’s not one clean story. It’s a fractured, contradictory mess. His work is no longer just paint on canvas. It’s a battlefield for other people’s ideas about nation, religion, art, and who gets to own the past. And you have to wonder, now that he’s gone, if the man himself isn’t getting a bit lost in all the noise. The applause on one side, the shouting on the other. And somewhere in the middle, the paintings just hang there, silent.
