Husain's 21 unseen canvases on auction depict his vision of the last century

MUMBAI: Dadiba Pundole recollects the day towards the end of 2003 when Maqbool Fida Husain walked into the Pundole's art gallery, located in Fort, Mumbai, and asked Dadiba to postpone the next exhibition, as he wanted to use the space as a studio. 'He told us, 'I've lived through the 20th century, and I want to document it in paint',' Dadiba said. That very evening, buckets of paint and rolls of canvas arrived. Husain, then 90, pinned one stretch of canvas up on the long side of the gallery and approached it with a charcoal. Over the course of the next few weeks, during which time Dadiba grew increasingly anxious, Husain sketched and painted almost incessantly, bringing icons and political events to life with bold colours. 'At that time, we had no clue what would come of it. We didn't know how much he wanted to paint, or what all he wanted to depict. Nothing was discussed,' Dadiba said.
Husain eventually moved his canvases and paints to a friend's empty apartment in Deira, Dubai, and within a year produced 25 works — often cutting up his canvases into diptychs or triptychs — that he showed at a day-long event at the Al Burj in 2004. The works, which he initially titled, An Artist's Vision of the 20th Century, and eventually came to be called, Our Plant Called Earth or OPEC, were exhibited hanging as scrolls from a high ceiling. Actor Shabana Azmi was invited to conduct a conversation with the artist. After showing these works at the Pierre Cardin Centre in Paris, Husain sold all of them to Mumbai-based businessman Guru Swarup Srivastava for a spectacular sum of ₹25 crore — an amount that at the time 'could have bought all of Husain's oeuvre up to that point,' Dadiba pointed out.
Later that year, Husain announced his plan to make 100 works around the same theme, and sell them to Srivastava for ₹100 crore in a press conference held in New Delhi's Vadehra Art gallery. 'While Srivastava is not a collector, both of us share similar concerns about Indian art being greatly undervalued and that it deserves to be treated on the same platform as Western art,' Rediff.com reported Husain telling the reporters.
The same December, Srivastava's company, Swarup Group, started an online agricultural commodities exchange. Two years later in 2006, the Central Bureau of Investigation initiated a probe into the Swarup Group and against Srivastava for alleged misappropriation of ₹150 crore from a ₹236-crore loan from the National Agricultural Cooperative Marketing Federation of India Ltd (NAFED). In 2008, a tribunal permitted NAFED to secure assets of ₹100 crore, including the Husain paintings.
Husain, too, abandoned his project, and only these 25 works remain of his prolificity.
A little over two decades later, the works are back on Dadiba's walls, this time completed, and ready for auction on the orders of the Bombay high court. The sale is being conducted on the instance of NAFED, the claimant in the court case. Dadiba submitted a valuation report of the paintings, valuing them at ₹25 crore, last May and earlier this year, the gallerist-turned-auctioneer was approached to put the works under the hammer. In March, his team began serious work on the paintings that had stayed rolled up for several years. He rejoined some of the canvases that the artist had split, for the sake of visual continuity, and also treated all of the works to rigorous restoration.
The works that now total to 21 lots will be auctioned on June 12, under strict rules laid down by the Mumbai Sheriff, which includes that interested bidders submit an Earnest Money Deposit of ₹5 lakh and that they pay the amount of the sale by June 27. The high court has asked for a Sheriff's report on the sale of the works by July 3.
The works are variously priced – some between ₹60 lakh to ₹80 lakh, others between ₹2 crore to ₹3 crore. The final cost of the works may go up higher, as Husain has recently seen an upswing among collectors. Earlier in March, a 1954 piece titled Gram Yatra fetched ₹118 crore in a Christie's auction.
The works are historically significant as they not only depict the famed artist's vision of the last century, but also point to his varied inspirations that shaped his global and cosmopolitan outlook. We see a Charlie Chaplinesque figure hold a young child's hand as a rocket takes off behind them. Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin, the leaders of Great Britain, the United States of America and Soviet Union, respectively, sit around a chess board with human figures toppled over it as pawns, inspired by the Yalta Conference of 1945 that signalled the end of World War II. In a far more abstract triptych, we see different races of men sit on a bench that has been propped up by goblins and cherubs. They are bookended by one figure holding an Olympic torch, and another, dressed in coattails balancing a tray. Another canvas shows the backs of two women — one in a sari, another in a dress, a clear indication of the East and the West — sitting together in convivial joy as a dove spreads its wings beneath their bench.
Explaining this series and Husain's approach, art critic Ranjit Hoskote, writes in the show's catalogue: '(...T)he 20th century was, far more than any previous epoch, distinguished by the self-conscious and global historical awareness that its artists, intellectuals and political visionaries demonstrated. Many of these figures — whether the Communists, the Free Market advocates, the Suprematists, the Surrealists, or the protagonists of the Non-Aligned Movement — saw themselves as actors on a world stage, with all of recorded history and geological time as their backdrop and the cosmos as their frontier. With his boundless curiosity, inventiveness, playfulness and commitment to inquiry, Husain embodied this world-view to perfection.'
'What's interesting to see is the range of influences Husain clearly had in his life. But what is even more curious for me is to wonder what else he would have shown had he completed his original idea and made 100 paintings,' Dadiba said.

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