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In the galaxy of modern masters, one name that is synonymous with twentieth century Indian Art, is M. F. Husain.
Born in Pandharpur, Maharashtra, on 17 September 1913, Husain came to Bombay in 1937 to become a painter, where he slept on footpaths and painted under streetlights. A self-taught artist, he began his career painting cinema posters and hoardings, and, in 1941, started making toys and furniture designs.
He imagined a secular language for modern Indian art that translated India’s ‘composite culture’ into a rich mosaic of colours. As a member of the Progressive Artists’ Group, launched in 1947, Husain heralded a new freedom for Indian art in the post-Independence decades. A peripatetic painter, Husain covered both geographical and conceptual territories, and transited at will between painting and poetry, assemblage and performance, installation and cinema. He experimented with text and images, and painted alongside musicians to translate music’s elusiveness into the accuracy of brushstroke. His first film, a short film titled Through the Eyes of a Painter, won the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1967.

Husain earned renown for his paintings of horses, though he became equally well-known for his series on Mother Teresa, or the British Raj, among others. His work reflected the relationship between generations of performers, and he referenced India’s syncretic culture using motifs and figures imbued with mythological meaning to give them a modern makeover in keeping with prevalent art practices.
Husain was awarded the Padma Shri in 1966, the Padma Bhushan in 1973, and the Padma Vibhushan in 1991 by the Indian government. Well into his nineties, he continued to paint despite living in exile in London and Dubai, having fled from India in 2006 following death threats and obscenity cases filed against him. He accepted Qatari citizenship in 2010 and passed away in London on 9 June 2011.