Mar 13, 2018 - Sale 2469

Sale 2469 - Lot 567

Price Realized: $ 3,750
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 4,000 - $ 6,000
MAQBOOL FIDA HUSAIN
Untitled (Woman with Two Donkeys).

Color lithograph, 1960. 360x468 mm; 14 1/8x18 3/8 inches, full margins. Signed and numbered 92/200 in pencil, lower right. A very good impression of this extremely scarce, early lithograph.

Primarily a self-taught artist, Husain (1915-2011) is among the most important Indian artists of the 20th century. In the 1940s he joined the Bombay Progressive Artists' Group, which had been founded by another pillar of 20th century Indian painting, Francis Newton Souza. By the 1950s, Husain had become one of the first modern Indian artists to break with nationalist traditions and adopt various influences from post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism and the international avant-garde into his work.

From the time of his first solo international exhibition in 1952 in Zurich onward, his paintings--usually thematic works on topics ranging from Mohandas K. Gandhi to religion to rural Indian life and his stellar horse subjects--became increasingly popular and more expressive due in part to the influence of Abstract Expressionism via the New York School of the 1940s/1950s. He also imbued his work with characteristics from earlier European modernists like Cézanne and Matisse, as well as Picasso, with whom he shared the prestigious special invitee status to the São Paulo Biennial in 1971.