The Lawh Wa Qalam: M.F. Husain Museum opened its doors on November 28th in Qatar, making it the first museum dedicated solely to post-independence Indian modernist Maqbool Fida Husain. Featuring over 150 works and personal objects spanning the life and career of the pioneering artist, the museum’s galleries trace Husain’s lifelong engagement with Indian culture and folklore—an engagement often met with controversy—as he shaped the visual language of 20th-century modernism with his signature Cubist approach.
Born in 1915 in Pandharpur, Maharashtra, India, to India’s Muslim minority, Husain had an early interest in art. By 17, he was sleeping on pavements in Bombay (now Mumbai), searching for a job. This led to the start of his artistic career painting cinema banners across the city, where he honed techniques of speed and working on large-scale surfaces. Over the next seven decades, his practice expanded across painting, drawing, film, tapestry, and installation work, addressing the central question: What is the visual language of India?
His later years were spent far from India. He faced legal and political pressure due to several paintings depicting Hindu deities in the nude, creating an uproar from India’s far-right; Husain lived in self-imposed exile beginning in 2006. By the late 2000s, he was spending his time between London and Qatar, creating artwork that referenced connections between Indian civilization and the Arab world. He passed away in London in 2011, leaving behind an expansive, cross-continental body of work that continues to build momentum. In 2025, Untitled (Gram Yatra) (1954) sold for $13.75 million at Christie’s—setting a new auction record for modern Indian art.
The new Doha museum, built around a design derived from Husain’s own sketch, gathers this narrative arc under one roof in the country where he became a citizen late in life.
“He lived through world wars, independence movements, and profound political change,” said Noof Mohammed, curator of Lawh Wa Qalam: M.F. Husain Museum. “We hope visitors see how inseparable his life was from his art.”
Below, we highlight 8 remarkable works in the new Doha museum.
Untitled (Doll’s Wedding) (1950)
One of M.F. Husain’s earliest works emerged at a pivotal moment, both in his personal journey—as he joined the national avant-garde through the Progressive Artists’ Group—and in the life of a newly independent India.
Founded in the aftermath of the 1947 partition, the Progressive Artists’ Group wanted to develop a distinctly Indian modernism by synthesizing Western artistic movements with local visual traditions. As India grappled with the lasting effects of British colonialism and sought to reclaim control over its narrative, the group captured this broader effort to rebuild a unified national identity.
The painting is inspired by the Indian childhood custom of staging mock weddings between dolls, a subject that, for Husain, evoked the “authenticity” of early sensory experience.
This work reaches back to an earlier chapter of his life when he earned a living designing children’s toys—which shaped his visual approach throughout his career.
Quit India Movement (1985)
Throughout the 1980s, Husain’s work continued to draw from postcolonialism, producing a series of works chronicling India’s struggle against British colonial rule. By this point in his career, Husain had developed his style of sharp contours, flattened geometry, and modernist reduction.
The iconic painting centers on the historic events of 1942, when Gandhi’s call for mass civil disobedience ignited the Quit India Movement. Husain placed the date prominently at the top, accompanied by striding, faceless colonial figures rendered in stark outline. Below them, a seated ascetic raises his hand in a gesture of resistance. The compressed composition and limited color palette heighten the sense of urgency. It was a turning point in his work from willful nostalgia to chronicling the political and social turning points that shaped his world.
Elephant (1992)
In the 1990s, M.F. Husain came under renewed scrutiny when earlier paintings of nude Hindu deities resurfaced in a magazine, drawing massive criticism from Hindu far-right nationalist groups.
His cut-out, two-dimensional work became a recurring part of his practice, somewhere between the media of sculpture and drawing. Though lesser known, these pieces show his enduring preoccupation with Indian cultural symbolism. The elephant—long revered in Hinduism as a representation of wisdom—serves here as an emblematic figure. The piece is evidence of Husain’s personal search for an essential Indian visual language through its iconography.
Mother Teresa (1998)
Husain first painted the humanitarian nun in 1980, shortly after she received the Nobel Peace Prize and the Bharat Ratna, India’s highest award for civilians. He returned to her as a subject for over a decade as a symbol of motherhood. This theme played a significant role in his work, particularly as he came to terms with his own loss of his mother as an infant.
Husain recalled: “Can anyone make up for the loss of a mother? I don’t even have a picture of her. She refused to get herself photographed…Sadly I have nothing which remotely resembles or reminds me of my mother. She is just a name to me, not even a memory.”
This absence informed his decision to portray mothers without facial features. The Mother Teresa (1998) triptych stretches across a green-painted wall in the museum, with the three canvases tightly aligned so the figures—an emaciated man and three sari-clad figures symbolizing Mother Teresa—cross the borders. He portrays Mother Teresa as mournful and fragmented. A modernist figurative abstraction, the work shows her figure disjointed, sunken into deep crimson reds hued in heavy black, with more focus on her form and posture than individual identity; her limbs are elongated and figure cloaked in heavy drapery. Husain was so in awe of Mother Teresa’s work and presence that he noted he could not depict her in realist form. Husain’s interest in women extended into his later work in film as well; his 2000 film Gaja Gamini, starring his muse Madhuri Dixit, a Bollywood star, was conceived as a tribute to womanhood.
Humanism (2003)
In the 2000s, Husain’s identity as a Muslim artist became increasingly politicized and his work was increasingly scrutinized. By the early 2000s, far-right Hindu nationalist groups had escalated their attacks—disrupting exhibitions, launching legal challenges, and even attacking his home and artwork. This hostility he faced sharpened the direction of his work as he increasingly moved towards themes that emphasized the possibility of unity across backgrounds.
Humanism, one work in the 10-part “Theorama” series, was completed just before Husain’s exile. It was one of his largest projects, commissioned by Mumbai’s Hinduja Foundation to celebrate global faiths and identities. Two paintings from the series were later exhibited at the United Nations headquarters, and the project’s message was subsequently embraced by British Prime Minister Tony Blair in a pledge for peace in the new millennium.
Framed around 10 religions and philosophies, the series focuses on the ancient Indian belief that all spiritual paths lead to a universal truth and shared human values. A reclining figure stretches across the canvas, surrounded by script, symbols, and torn blocks of handmade paper.
Yemen (2008)
This piece, as part of Husain’s Arab civilization series, was created two years after he left India for his self-imposed exile, marking a notable shift in his practice from India to the Muslim world.
By 2008, still in exile, Husain was still famous in the art world, known for his curious signature look of Hermès suits and bare feet. In 2005, Forbes profiled him, labeling him “The Picasso of India.” During this period, he divided his time between London and Dubai, but legal pressures followed him abroad. Indian courts continued to pursue obscenity cases related to earlier works, and in 2007, a lower court ordered the seizure of his Mumbai properties—a decision later stayed by the Supreme Court.
For Husain, the idea of “home” started to shift with more distance and challenges from his home country. Yemen became one of the works that signaled an expansion of his artistic focus beyond India toward new geographies shaped by exile. The acrylic painting brings together minarets, camel caravans, bridges, motorcycles, market stalls, and rooftop figures. A plane crosses the sky, while a white dove appears near the lower edge.
This work became one of Husain’s defining late paintings because, even in exile, the childhood wonder that shaped his early practice remained present—now directed toward a new frontier. Lesser known is Husain’s Yemeni heritage, and this painting reflects a return to those ancestral roots at a time when his future and connection in India had grown uncertain.
Arab Astronomy (2008)
Husain made this work to bring together two cultural worlds central to his life: India, where he developed his visual language, and the Arab world, where he spent his final years. Though he had long drawn on Indian traditions, his later work increasingly turned toward subjects rooted in Islamic intellectual history. In this piece, Husain focuses on Abu Maʿshar, the 9th-century Persian astrologer whose writings circulated across India, the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe, shaping astronomical study for centuries.
Rather than separating these influences, Husain folds them together. An archetypal figure of a prophet stands within a field of mountains, stars, and personified celestial bodies, while the bold contours and flattened forms echo the style he refined in his early canvases. The saturated blues, reds, and yellows recall the palette he often employed for Indian themes, while the celestial motifs gesture toward the medieval Islamic world.
The piece can also be seen as an inflection point in his work, a moment when he began to understand these traditions as intertwined—shifting from works shaped by displacement to opting for an optimistic portrayal of the two worlds he held close.
Seero fi al Ardh (2019)
The final major work of M.F. Husain was a kinetic installation commissioned by Her Highness Sheikha Moza bint Nasser for the Qatar Foundation. The multi-sensory installation took shape around the time he accepted Qatari citizenship, which, under Indian law prohibiting dual nationality, automatically resulted in the loss of his Indian citizenship. Though Husain passed away before the installation was finished, it was completed posthumously through the sketches and designs he had left behind.
“The entire ensemble is like a performance of dancing horses in crystal glass,” the artist said of the work, a nod to his lifelong connection to the motif of the horse, which coursed through his work for decades. Five life-sized Murano crystal glass horses rotate on a motorized carousel illuminated by beaming strobe lights. They are joined by five vintage automobiles in a metaphor for the journey between the natural to the mechanical. Their movements are synchronized with music Husain selected to evoke horsemanship and strength. Suspended from the ceiling is a bronze figure of Abbas ibn Firnas, the 9th-century C.E. father of aviation, an ode to the scientific advancements of the Islamic world.
Given Husain was working on the project at around 94 years old, it is likely that he was confronting his own questions of mortality and legacy. In that light, the phrase inscribed on the pavilion, “Lawh Wa Qalam” or “The Tablet and The Pen,” takes on a new resonance. Traditionally tied to the divine written word, this phrase here is used to claim authorship of his final chapter, as though finding his space in an increasingly technological-forward world. Even with these fears, shown in the cars overtaking the horses he had loved, his optimism carries through. In the context of his last years, the work reveals an artist coming to terms with his fate, while continuing to animate his inner world through faith, unity, and a collective imagination.
from Artsy News https://ift.tt/Nz9Ziny
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