M.F. Husain, an outsider in 2024’s India?

As the KNMA’s immersive tribute, The Rooted Nomad, opens in Venice, we wonder how the modernist and his bold statements would have fared today

In 2011, after M.F. Husain died in London at the age of 95, writer and filmmaker Ruchir Joshi wrote a sobering tribute to the artist’s life in The Telegraph, Kolkata. “Though he was possibly the nicest person among the Progressive Artists Group,” he wrote, “Husain was also perhaps the one with the least talent and originality.”

Joshi went on to emphasise Husain’s intense debt to both Picasso and Matisse, while acknowledging the complicated legacy he had left behind. “If Husain’s departure [in 2010] for Qatar... marked a defeat for a certain idea of modern India,” he wrote, “his death presents a challenge to those of us who felt diminished and humiliated by the old man’s exile.”

Whether you are an admirer of his art or not, Husain remains one of India’s most significant artists over a decade after his death. His work continues to be coveted by collectors, while the staggering multiplicity of his imagination remains unparalleled. The Rooted Nomad, opening this month at the Magazzini del Sale in Dorsoduro, Venice, is not only a deep dive into the modernist’s chequered life and multidimensional work, but also a timely reminder of the values he cherished and enshrined through his art and actions. (Incidentally, Husain, who participated in the 1953 and 1955 Venice Biennales, was one of the first artists from India to show his work there.)

Presented by the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, and curated by Roobina Karode, director and chief curator of the KNMA, this immersive exhibition aims to signal Husain’s enduring relevance to a wider, global audience. One of the most significant challenges of curating such an ambitious show is the selection of works from “Husain’s vast oeuvre and prolific practice”, says Karode, “especially since his iconic works have been showcased extensively both inside and outside of India”. The idea has been to bring a “fresh perspective in representing him, while conceptually and experientially bridging the gap between the artist and the global audience”.

The exhibition unfolds in two parts, as Karode explains: an introduction to the artist through a physical experience of his original works, such as Yatra (1955) and Blue Ganges (1966), which then leads the viewers into an immersive (virtual) experience in the latter part of the space.

Husain, forever inventive and curious, an artist who pushed against the imagined boundaries between ‘popular’ and ‘serious’ art, would have loved this approach. As a young man he had painted posters for movies, and later in life he actually made several films (the Bollywood actor Madhuri Dixit being one of his muses). Performance was in his DNA, as was a penchant for making bold statements about his beliefs, often to his detriment in his homeland, India.

Indeed, the title, The Rooted Nomad, captures the twin forces that ruled his life: his deep roots in India, having come of age before Partition, nurtured by the syncretism of yore; and a restless urge to traverse the world, to soak in the cosmopolitanism of a nomadic life, where every idea was his for the taking. “The breadth of his experiences,” as Karode puts it, “defied a narrow vision of India.”