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
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
Write to info@whitebankfineart.co.uk, or start below.
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.
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.
