The Love Story of Maqbool & Maria

M.F. Husain enjoyed the spotlight. He was the star of the Indian art fraternity, instantly recognised by his white beard, bare feet and ubiquitous brush, roaming the globe, courted by film-stars, industrialists, politicians. The media loved him and Husain himself spoke and wrote often about his rags-to-riches life. Husain met and fell in love with Maria on a trip to Prague in 1956. Their affair continued for three years and he even proposed marriage, but she turned him down. Later, he was to call her the "purest" love of his life. Husain's life was an open book, except for one chapter that he kept close to his heart - Maria.
Even more poignant is the story of the "Maria Collection", the drawings and paintings Husain made during the three years he knew Maria and gifted to her. Art writer-curator Kishore Singh's M.F. Husain, The Journey of a Legend tells the story of this suite of works, now part of the Stellar International Art Foundation.

EXCERPT:
Prague has a special place in Husain's life. The seat of two Holy Roman Empires, the capital of Czechoslovakia, but also the cultural and political capital of central Europe, it has grown quaintly along the banks of the Vltava river. It was here, in 1956, that an exhibition of his paintings was held at Gallery Mannes. In all, he showed thirty-four paintings, three weeks prior to the opening in order to carry out the commission. At the time Husain was not yet fluent in spoken English, so a translator was provided to him.
Maria Jaroslav Jurkova came with an insatiable curiosity, and in Husain she found somebody with whom she could discuss the Vedas and the Upanishads, the teachings of Vivekananda and Swami Ramakrishna Paramhansa, Western philosophy and music. Love between them was instantaneous. When the exhibition opened, Husain, to everyone's surprise, announced the paintings were no longer for sale as he hoped to make a gift of them all to Maria. In 1957, when Air-India hired him to paint murals for its office in Prague, he returned eagerly and they renewed their relationship. Husain kept returning to Prague. He proposed marriage; she considered the possibility. They embarked on a long-distance affair, writing letters full of longing and passion. "Hold the sky in your hands as the stretch of my canvas is unknown to me," he wrote to her.
Perhaps it would be best to reproduce the full extent of that declaration and testament here:
"Send me a snow-clad sheet of sky
Bearing no scar
How shall I paint in white words
The encircling contours
Of your boundless mourns?
When I begin to paint
Hold the sky in your hands
As the stretch of my canvas
Is unknown to me"
Eight years later, in 1964, Maria married a young Icelander. In the meanwhile, Husain had overwhelmed her with more paintings, some painted in Prague, others back home from India. He was besotted. She held off. After all, he was already married and had children. Besides, did she want to move to India and give up life as she knew it in Czechoslovakia? Those must have been turbulent years, buffeted as much by passion as with heartbreak. In the end, she terminated the affair.
Husain attended her marriage, and they remained in touch. When the couple migrated to Australia, Husain gallantly agreed to help carry the "'Maria Collection' of paintings through customs". In 2005, he visited Maria and her family in Australia, but a year later, when she opted to return to Prague, she insisted on returning the paintings to him. She no longer felt a right to keep them with her, even though their value was worth millions of dollars. A container of paintings arrived at Husain's home in Dubai accompanied by a short note. "I would like to return the gift you once gave me," Maria wrote to Husain. "They do not belong to me, they belong to India." It was an act of selflessness motivated once again by her affection, if not love, for Husain. "When I went to Dubai in February 2007 to meet Husain," wrote civil servant and filmmaker K Bikram Singh, "I found about sixty of these paintings displayed in a section of his house there." It was a love story like no other. She returned eighty paintings, but were they all? Perhaps not, Husain hinted to Khalid Mohammed. "Maria hasn't returned the six portraits I had done of her," he shared, convinced, even in his old age that "She has returned my art, not my love."
Husain enjoyed the company of many women in his eventful life, but it was Maria he "wanted to fall in love with, but couldn't", observed writer and filmmaker Khalid Mohammed, "It was this experience of love for Maria, more than anything else, that changed Husain's way of looking at women and helped him arrive at one of the most important themes of his career as an artist, that is woman," noted Bikram Singh in his 2008 biography on Husain and his career. If Hindi fiction writer Shrikant Verma felt that "Beauty, particularly woman's beauty, is the subject of Husain's paintings," he was not far wrong.
Author Mulk Raj Anand had reached a similar conclusion on his subject and his choice of colours, noting of a 1948 body of work by the artist: "The paintings on view were in gay colours, with greens and blues and yellows and browns and reds predominating. The female forms were everywhere, with big staring eyes, large working hands, big hips, flat feet and enlarged coiffeurs. They were composed in relation to symbolic birds, flowers or pitchers."

(Excerpted from MF Husain: The Journey of a Legend with permission from Stellar International Art Foundation)