Signed and dated 'Husain 002' (upper left)

PROVENANCE
Saffronart / Lot 67 / Spring Auction / Modern and Contemporary Indian Art / 11 - 12 March 2009
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Relentlessly paying obeisance to early Indian art, M.F. Husain incorporated local traditions and characteristics into his style, presentation, and themes. He plied various sources and presented subjects he deemed representative of the Indian culture and heritage in his canvases; from dancers, sculptures, to images of the great epics and literature.

Depicting the creative interaction between different art forms, Husain initiated his series on musicians as early as 1959 and revisited the theme throughout the rest of his career. In them, he adopted traditional postures from sculptures for his figures to convey a sense of dance and movement while depicting traditional instruments to express a sense of music on his canvases, as seen here.

Using his distinct pictorial language, he depicted the lady featurelessly to evoke a sense of universality by focusing on the representational more than individualizing details of the face. Asserting his own brand of symbolism, the titular lady is seen holding a veena and a mudra in her right hand while wearing a white sari, alluding to the Goddess Saraswati who bestowed the gift of music to humanity in the Hindu faith.