[Reader-list] Maqbool Fida Husain: Beyond Art

[inder salim]

time to talk Hussain, perhaps.

if i were the prime minister of india, i would immediately recommend a
Bharat Ratna in his honour.

obviously, the reason why this can not happen, is 'the vote
calculation'  in other words,  simple profit making ananlysis. which
is akin to corporate world
The art summit in Delhi was a part of that profit making nexus, who
would never like to jeoparadise their profit making machines.
and it would naive on our part to expect them to do so.

Hussain is likely to be part of any auction in the world,  we are
unncessarily worried about the less represention of hussain at the art
summit.. he is part and parcel of that market oriented art.

The decision of art sumitwallas to delete hussain from stalls was a
right intutioin--parallel to art sumit, a simple hussain prints
organized by Sahmat was attacked, by Sri Ram Sena. which we condemned
, i did a little performance for hussain and taslima as well, that is
that..

When Hussain paid tribute to Satyajit Ray, Dom Moreas described that
show as a tribute to a genius by a mediocre.
was he right or worg? there are two opnions on that. and both are right.
when i saw Hussain's Maduri Dixit , i felt so tired... when i see his
Indira Gandhi i feel disappointed... but, that is not all what he has
done...he has a sense of design, and good control on line work, but he
needs to learn how to draw feet and hands, which are unecessarly
omitted from his designs, all said and done, he still is much better
painter than most most of indian artist, but not the best.


what irritated me lately about Hussain is his penchant to buy
expensive cars... i guess he lost his track, i guess when he became
famous, he simple turned into a money making machine... he himself
said  that if he sits on an egg, it will turn into gold.

that will let him down, in in the long run, i guess

with love and long life to hussain

is



On Sun, Aug 31, 2008 at 10:52 AM, Naeem Mohaiemen
<naeem.mohaiemen at gmail.com> wrote:
> The Telegraph, August 29, 2008
>
> Editorial
> BEYOND ART
>
> Between fair-weather secularists and brazen fanatics, it is often
> difficult to decide who is the more deplorable. The India Art Summit,
> which opened last week in New Delhi, was supposed to be the biggest-
> ever art trade fair in the country. What could have been a platform
> for modern Indian art to assert itself in a major way has suddenly
> turned into a source of acute embarrassment. Among the 400 names that
> feature on this grand show, put up by Hanmer and Partner with the
> support of the ministry of culture and tourism, the most striking
> absence was Maqbool Fida Husain. This omission remains unpardonable
> for several reasons. It is audacious even to conceive of an
> exhibition of Indian art that leaves out works by Mr Husain from it.
> The very idea not only reveals a pitiful ignorance of art history but
> also expresses disrespect towards one of the most universally
> acclaimed of Indian artists. It is not without reason that Mr Husain
> is considered to be a modern master. He made his mark for the first
> time in the late Forties with a distinctly original idiom — a
> cosmopolitan blend of Western and indigenous influences. This
> pluralism has turned him into one of the highest-selling Indian
> artists worldwide.
>
> For this reason alone, it is unforgivable that the United Progressive
> Alliance government, with its avowedly secularist agenda, chose not
> to rally for the inclusion of works by Mr Husain for fear of a
> backlash from religious fundamentalists. Since 2006, Mr Husain, now
> in his nineties, is on a self-imposed exile. The Hindu Right
> continues to bay for his blood for painting some of its holy pantheon
> in the nude. Mr Husain was unceremoniously left out of the art summit
> as the organizers refused to risk an attack by a bigoted mob. It did
> not matter even if the so-called controversial works were not shown:
> Mr Husain has ceased to be the symptom of a malaise in Indian
> democracy, he has become the disease itself. When Sahmat, an NGO,
> protested by putting up an exhibition of prints by him, 10 members of
> Ram Sena, a pro-Hindutva outfit, disrupted the show violently. The
> fiasco has not only exposed the tensions within the secular ideals of
> the UPA, but has also revealed a deeper fissure in the polity. Beyond
> the murky politics and shifting ideologies, it is the ideals
> enshrined in the Constitution that have been threatened by this
> incident
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