M. F. Husain valuation
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.
What a work by M. F. Husain is worth
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Bio
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.
Baroda, São Paulo and the films
Husain learned calligraphy at a madrasa in Baroda and attended the Sir J. J. School of Art in Bombay. His film Through the Eyes of a Painter won India's National Film Award for best experimental film in 1967; he was a special invitee, with Picasso, at the São Paulo Biennial in 1971, and was nominated to the Rajya Sabha in 1986.
In 2008 he was commissioned to paint 32 large pictures of Indian history and finished eight before his death. He lived from 2006 in Doha and London, became a Qatari citizen in 2010, and died at the Royal Brompton Hospital in London in June 2011; he is buried at Brookwood. His sons Shamshad and Owais are also artists.
Toys, the Progressives and Meenaxi
Husain came from a Suleymani Bohra family. In his early years in Bombay he painted cinema posters and, for extra income, designed and built toys for a toy company, travelling to Gujarat to paint landscapes whenever he could afford it. Through the Progressive Artists' Group he joined young painters who wanted to break with the nationalist traditions of the Bengal school and build an Indian avant-garde engaged at an international level. His narrative pictures, in a modified Cubist manner, took on Gandhi, the British Raj and scenes of Indian city and village life, often in series.
The Films Division of the Government of India produced his film Through the Eyes of a Painter and two documentaries about him by Santi P. Choudhury, A Painter of Our Time in 1976 and Husain in 1980. In 2004 he directed Meenaxi: A Tale of Three Cities with his son Owais, and it was screened in the Marché du film at Cannes that year. The paintings at the centre of the later protests were made in 1970 and drew no complaint until a Hindi monthly reproduced them in 1996; the Delhi High Court dismissed the first criminal complaints in 2004. A museum devoted to him, Lawh Wa Qalam, opened in Doha in 2025.
Best auction results
- Untitled (Gram Yatra) $13.8m
- Oil on canvas, 1954 · New York · March 2025
- Publicly reported
- The artist's auction record.
Results as reported at the time of sale, inclusive of buyer's premium. They are a record of what specific works achieved on specific days, not a guide to what any other work is worth.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
