M. F. Husain
Painted cinema hoardings in Bombay, became India's best-known artist, and died in exile.
Maqbool Fida Husain was born at Pandharpur in 1915, worked painting cinema billboards in Bombay, and joined the Progressive Artists' Group in 1947, the year of independence. He built a manner from Indian folk and temple sculpture, Basohli miniature colour and European modernism, painting horses, Mother Teresa, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana at great speed and enormous volume, barefoot, for six decades. From the 1990s a campaign over depictions of Hindu deities brought hundreds of legal cases and threats; he left India in 2006, took Qatari citizenship, and died in London in 2011 without returning.
Husain is the largest and most heavily forged name in modern Indian art, and the volume of fakes is the dominant practical fact of this market — provenance to a documented exhibition, a named collection or a first-hand purchase is essential, and expert opinion is normally required. Prices are set principally in Mumbai, New Delhi, London and New York. The output includes oils and acrylics on canvas, works on paper, serigraphs published in editions of a few hundred, and a large quantity of unauthorised reproductions offered as prints.
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