NEW YORK: A massive 10-foot tall mural-sized painting created in 1975 using mythical artist M.F. Husain as a backdrop for former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s public rally is on show at the renowned Asia Society Museum right here. The 60-foot huge oil on canvas portrays ‘Lightning’ depicts horses, amongst Husain’s favorite subjects to paint, on 12 massive panels. One of the Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group founding participants, Husain, created the painting as part of a series of artwork about India’s first girl Prime Minister. Gandhi had completed 11 years as a top minister and addressed a meeting in Shivaji Park in Mumbai, then known as Bombay, in 1975.
Husain painted ‘Lightning’ as a backdrop to this assembly.
On June 25 of that year, Gandhi imposed a nationwide emergency across India. The exhibition ‘M F Husain – Art and The Nation’ will run at the main museum and cultural corporation on August 4. The painting has been lent to Asia Society by an entrepreneur, investor, and art collector, Kent Charugundla, who bought the artwork from Husain in December 2002.
Charugundla stated that after collecting the innovative artist’s works, he became curious about Husain’s artwork and wanted to have his largest work. Lightning became the most effective among Husain’s seminal works and his signature artwork of horses. Charugundla advised PTI he decided to lend the painting to the Asia Society Museum because he wanted “anyone to have got admission to it and enjoy the masterpiece that M F Husain created in 1975 as a backdrop of the then Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi’s speech.
Charugundla said it turned into an “honor” for him to own an artwork of such a big scale. Emphasizing the painting’s significance to him, he told Husain that it displays symbols of war, his family making plans, agriculture, and nuclear power in a single artwork. He suggests the power of the horses marching from darkness to mild with this type of remarkable energy and power, charging to attain a destination,” he introduced.
Lightning of M F Husain for India is what Guernica of Picasso is for Spain,” Charugundla said, regarding Picasso’s maximum famous 1937 anti-war painting created in response to the bombing of Guernica, a Basque Country city in northern Spain, via Nazi Germany. The 12 huge panels of the portrait are affected by visible references to India and the Nineteen Seventies, even though they are visually absent. The grandeur of the larger-than-lifestyle length horses depicted consumes and overpowers the visitors. It also indicates the potential to execute a portrayal on one of this massive scale is a great accomplishment,” he stated.
Gandhi herself, in step with information about the painting from Asia Society. That Lightning becomes created on this tumultuous length of India’s records, positions Husain on the middle of Indian modernism and elicits discussions about the role of artwork in transferring political contexts,” an overview of the exhibit said. Against a historical past of inexperienced, pink, blue, crimson, and white horses mentioned in black charge in an energetic and frenetic line in the left direction.
This is an indication of the unstoppable development of the new nation. The painting has visual references to India within the Seventies and Gandhi. According to facts at the Asia Society internet site, the image, the grain stalk is seen towards the right of the artwork, references India’s Green Revolution from 1967 to 1978 that was initiated in an attempt to make the kingdom enough grain production.
On the left is a mom with her younger kids marked with a pink triangle, denoting India’s circle of relatives making plans guidelines. Other visual references in Lightning evoke the user’s business and army targets. The horse at the left of the painting is framed with the aid of the crimson sun of atomic power, a sign of the new country’s technological promise of nuclear power.