Category Archives: Artists – India

MF Husain’s ‘Last’ Works

22 Thursday May 2014

Posted by in Artists - India, Exhibitions - United Kingdom - Individual Artists

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MF Husain

At 93 years of age, MF Husain could have been forgiven for calling it a day. But when he sought exile from India in 2006 — on account of the vandalisation of his works and the stress of presenting himself in small-town courts all over India, where cases of obscenity had been filed to harass him for having had the temerity to paint goddesses in the nude — he sought not retirement but revalidation. And that came easily for, arguably, India’s most popular artist. In spite of his advanced age, the royal family of Qatar commissioned him to paint an epic series on the Arabic civilisation for the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha. And in London, the Mittal family — which had gifted the city the controversial ArcelorMittal Orbit ahead of the Olympic Games —s eized the opportunity to ask him to paint a tribute to Indian civilisation.

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Alphabets Shaped into Works of Art

29 Sunday Sep 2013

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Muqtar Ahmad

To unravel one’s calling in life is the first step towards the making of an evangelist. For Muqtar Ahmad, one of India’s most renowned Arabic calligraphers, that moment of reckoning came at an early age when teachers in his village school at Ranjhol, near Hyderabad, praised him for his beautiful handwriting which looked like calligraphy. Ahmad’s journey into the world of this intense form of art initially began under the tutelage of Zakir Al Hashmi and Gazi Tahiruddin Qaisar, two prominent calligraphers practising and teaching their art in Hyderabad’s Chatta Bazaar, renowned for printing invitation cards in Urdu calligraphy. After learning his first steps, the young Ahmad left for Bengaluru in the late 1980s and started working for the Urdu newspaper Salar.

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The Husain Conundrum

13 Wednesday Mar 2013

Posted by in Artists - India, Auctions - India

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MFHusain

The recent auction in Mumbai — on January 17th, 2013 of M.F.Husain’s works by Pundole’s — was nothing less than extraordinary. It was the first of its kind devoted solely to works by the modernist Indian painter anywhere in the world. The horde of 145 lots amassed over the years by the late Badrivishal Pitti, an art lover and collector from Hyderabad — his family had close ties with the Nizam — realised a whopping Rs. 18.5 crores, according to Dadiba Pundole, the auctioneer, well over the total pre-sale estimate of Rs 8.8 crores, with only four lots left unsold in the end. A spectacular result, as auctions go.

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