Untitled (Figures)

Full analysis

M.F. Husain, a founding member of the 1947 Progressive Artists' Group alongside F.N. Souza and S.H. Raza, left thousands of works untitled across his career, making a single 'Untitled' 1978 canvas difficult to identify with certainty against a formal catalogue raisonné. By the 1970s Husain was internationally established, having represented India at the Venice Biennale (1954) and São Paulo Biennale (1971), deep into a mature idiom fusing Cubist fracturing of form with folk and mythological iconography drawn from village India, an idiom honed painting Bollywood cinema hoardings in Bombay in the 1940s before the Progressive Artists' Group, founded partly as a reaction against both British academic realism and the revivalist Bengal School, gave him a modernist framework in which to place that commercial training. A representative 1970s figure composition organizes bodies as flat, interlocking dark-outlined shapes against broad fields of unmodulated colour, with facial features reduced to a few economical strokes; Husain's brush is fast and unhesitating, an extension of his sign-painting speed elevated into a modernist virtue rather than a limitation. Britannica and other biographical accounts note that by this decade Husain had also begun the horse motif that would become his signature — an image he traced variously to Chinese art seen in reproduction and to the Duldul steeds of Shia Muharram processions from his own upbringing — and was increasingly working across mediums including film (he later directed 'Through the Eyes of a Painter,' 1967, and features in the 1970s-80s). His market has continued to climb long after his 2011 death in exile in London, following controversy over his depictions of Hindu deities: an untitled 1954 canvas sold for $13.8 million at Christie's New York in March 2025, the auction house and The Art Newspaper reporting it as the most expensive work of modern or contemporary Indian art ever sold, a record that retroactively reframes the market context for any Husain painting from his prolific middle decades.

Technique & materials

Oil on board or canvas. Husain worked alla prima: thin oil washes block in colour fields, over which decisive black contour lines define flattened, angular Cubist-influenced planes, applied at speed without elaborate underdrawing.

Provenance

Husain's 1970s untitled works, unrecorded in a single catalogue raisonné, typically surface through gallery and auction channels. A representative work was included in the Indian Contemporary Fine Art exhibition, Los Angeles, 2001, before entering the secondary market through Saffronart. Husain's market reached a new high in March 2025 when an untitled 1954 canvas sold for $13.8 million at Christie's, the most expensive work of modern Indian art ever sold at auction.

Conservation history

No individually publicized conservation treatment is documented for a specific 1978 work; oil-on-board paintings face condition risks distinct from canvas, including warping and edge delamination from decades of private handling before entering the organized secondary market.