M. F. Husain

M.F. Husain: The Billboard Painter Who Became India's Most Wanted Artist

In 1934, a young man supporting himself by painting Bollywood cinema hoardings sold his first canvas on a Bombay roadside for ten rupees. Seventy-four years later he was, by most industry measures, the best-paid painter in India, with a single work later fetching $2.5 million at auction — and he was living in exile, unable to safely return to the country whose national identity had been the subject of his life's work. Maqbool Fida Husain's career traces almost the entire arc of independent India's relationship with its own modern art: celebrated as a founder of Indian modernism, then hounded out of the country by the same nationalist currents his paintings had tried to depict.

From Cinema Hoardings to the Art World

Born September 17, 1915, in Pandharpur, in a Suleymani Bohra Muslim family, Husain studied calligraphy at a madrasa in Baroda and attended Bombay's Sir Jamsetjee Jeejebhoy School of Art without completing a formal degree, supporting himself through the 1930s painting cinema billboards and designing toys. That commercial training left a visible mark on his mature style — bold, graphic, immediately legible compositions that art historians describe as narrative painting rendered in a modified Cubist idiom, closer to popular visual culture than to the academic modernism many of his peers pursued.

Founding the Progressive Artists' Group

Following Indian independence and Partition in 1947, which the group's members regarded as a decisive historical rupture, Husain became a founding member of the Bombay Progressive Artists' Group in December 1947. The Progressives deliberately broke with the nationalist Bengal School's revivalist aesthetic, pushing instead toward an internationally engaged, formally experimental Indian modernism — a project that placed Husain, alongside artists like F. N. Souza and S. H. Raza, at the center of what became independent India's dominant modern art movement.

Painting the Nation

Husain's subjects ranged across Gandhi, Mother Teresa, the Hindu epics, British colonial history, and the texture of Indian urban and rural life, but his recurring project across the 1970s was painting India's own transformation — industrialization, the Green Revolution, family planning campaigns, and military modernization — often through Prime Minister Indira Gandhi as a stand-in for Bharat Mata, or Mother India, itself. He also made films: his 1967 short *Through the Eyes of a Painter* won India's National Film Award for Best Experimental Film and a Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival, and his 2004 feature *Meenaxi* screened at Cannes, though its soundtrack drew objections from Muslim groups over an allegedly blasphemous qawwali.

The Nude Paintings and the Backlash

The controversy that defined Husain's later life began with paintings he made in 1970 depicting Hindu deities and Bharat Mata in the nude, images that drew little notice until they resurfaced in a 1996 Hindi magazine under the headline "M.F. Husain: A Painter or Butcher." Eight criminal complaints followed, and in 1998 members of the Hindu nationalist group Bajrang Dal attacked his home and vandalized his work. Though the Delhi High Court dismissed the complaints against him in 2004, hundreds of civil and criminal cases remained active by 2007, and an arrest warrant hung over him even as it was eventually suspended. Husain entered self-imposed exile in 2006, dividing his final years between Doha and London, and accepted Qatari citizenship in 2010 while retaining Overseas Citizenship of India status — a legal status, but not a physical homecoming.

Recognition, Contested and Uncontested

India honored Husain with the Padma Shri in 1966, the Padma Bhushan in 1973, and the Padma Vibhushan in 1991 — three of the country's highest civilian awards, all granted before the controversy over his religious paintings escalated. In exile, he continued working on commission, completing eight of a planned thirty-two large-scale paintings on Indian history and major works on Arab and Indian civilization for Qatar's then-first lady, Sheikha Moza bint Nasser. He was named among the 500 most influential Muslims globally by the Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre in 2010, and admirers unsuccessfully petitioned for India's highest civilian honor, the Bharat Ratna.

Death and a Museum Built on a Promise

Husain died of a heart attack at London's Royal Brompton Hospital on June 9, 2011, at ninety-five, and was buried at Brookwood Cemetery the next day, having produced an estimated 40,000 paintings over his lifetime. In 2025, Qatar opened the Lawh Wa Qalam museum dedicated entirely to his work in Doha's Education City, its architecture drawn from his own sketches — fulfilling a promise Sheikha Moza had made to him before his death, and placing his permanent institutional home in the country that gave him citizenship rather than the one that made him famous.

Why Husain Is Called a Genius

Husain's case for genius rests on a distinctive visual synthesis rather than any single masterpiece: he took the commercial vocabulary of cinema billboard painting — bold outlines, immediate legibility, dramatic scale — and fused it with Cubist structure to build a modern Indian pictorial language that was neither imported European modernism nor a revival of pre-colonial styles, and the Progressive Artists' Group he helped found is now treated by institutions like the Asia Society Museum as the founding movement of Indian modern art. His market valuation, output, and civilian honors confirm broad recognition of technical and inventive skill. The honest counter-case is sharper here than for most artists: Husain's most consequential works were not judged primarily on aesthetic terms by the audiences that mattered most to his later life, but on religious and political ones, and his own choice to keep exhibiting explicitly political and religiously charged imagery — knowing its history of provoking violence — reflects either genuine artistic conviction or a serious misjudgment of risk to himself and others, depending on the observer. Both his admirers and his harshest critics agree on his originality; they disagree entirely on whether that originality was used wisely.

Legacy

Husain remains the most commercially successful and most politically contested figure in modern Indian art, a founder of the movement that defined Indian modernism and, simultaneously, a permanent case study in how nationalist religious politics can force a country's most celebrated artist into exile from the nation his work spent decades trying to picture.

Achievements

• Notable work: Meenaxi: A Tale of Three Cities