Email
Print
ShareBacktracking, I took another look. No doubt about it, here was our very own rather uncharacteristically melancholy Husain and a horse, no less. And underneath this photo collage on museum archival paper was the title that said it all: The Persecution Of An Artist In His Homeland. Andrey Rublev by Tarkovsky. Delhi-based adman-artist Prasad Raghavan was indeed being clever and sly by alluding to the late Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky's masterpiece about the great 15th century Russian icon painter.
One of the underlying themes of this brilliant and enigmatic film is artistic freedom -- it was also about faith. Tarkovsky finished his film in 1966. However, the Soviet Union didn't allow the film to be released in his homeland for several years. The film went on to win accolades abroad and has carved itself a permanent niche in cinematic history. It has usually been read as an allegory of the cineaste's own life.
It wasn't just Raghavan's work that startled me: it was recently shown at Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke in Mumbai. And, here it was part of the stall of the BMG, a gallery that opens in Mumbai next month. No, it was the fact that both Husain and his horse had "made it" into the India Art Summit, despite the vociferous threats of fundamentalists who have been braying for the blood of the nonagenarian painter.
Some Trojan horse this! The organisers of this undoubtedly successful and vibrant Summit (it should really be called a Fair because the summit bit was just a small part of the three day art extravaganza) admitted that it was too risky to exhibit Husain's works without police protection. Various Hindu groups had threatened to destroy Husain's paintings if they were displayed.
They had done the same last year, for the first edition of this art fair of contemporary and modern art. But then again our dervish of a painter, whistle stopping between Dubai, London and wherever whimsy and fate take him, had also made an "appearance" at the artfest in Delhi.
Like Banquo's ghost, Husain hovered -- his presence all the more marked by his corporeal absence, in the flesh and blood so to speak. Ditto this time. Hopefully, this tugged at the conscience of many among the arterati who seem to have forgotten the painter responsible in no small measure for the current success -- not to speak of the wealth -- of contemporary Indian painters.
Horses have always been the artist's faithful companions. Last year Husain's presence at the art fair was marked in Ram Rahman's photograph of the artist painting a white horse during the inauguration of the exhibition of his painterly odes to muse Madhuri Dixit at the erstwhile Art Today gallery in Connaught Place. The photograph hung quietly in Nature Morte gallery's booth at the Fair. It unobtrusively served its purpose.
Obviously, being sly or oblique is sometimes the way to go, even in a democratic country like ours; and especially when the moral police are out and about with their censoring scissors. Allegory is even better, whether in cinema, art or literature. Just look at the work coming out of Pakistan, Iran and other countries where fundamentalists -- green not saffron this time -- call the shots in all spheres of life.
Their works on celluloid or on canvas have been all the more potent for it, allowing the imagination free reign. So, artists pick up your paint brushes, hammers and cameras and armour of allegory, you have nothing to lose but your invisible chains.
