Venice goes 'fida' over M F Husain

Maqbool Fida Husain, the barefoot painter who is one of India’s greatest modernists, had a very filmi story – boy from the country comes to big city, begins at the bottom doing odd jobs and painting hoardings, finds stardom but gets embroiled in court cases and is forced to leave the country. So, it’s apt that he is the hero of the very first fully immersive, multi-sensory show on an Indian artist .

Created by the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA), the show – which includes both his physical works and a rich digital production – opened on Thursday in Venice timed to coincide with the Biennale , considered the Olympics of the art world. As Husain was one of the first artists from India to present his works at the Venice Biennale in 1954, his ‘Yatra’ (the title of one of his signature works) has indeed come full circle.

At the exhibition venue Magazzini del Sale (a salt warehouse that is now a heritage building), you can see a boat with a pink wrap emblazoned with M F Husain bobbing on the water. “One feels so proud as an Indian to see Venice celebrating Husain,” says artist Jayasri Burman, who visited on opening day.

The immersive show , curated by Roobina Karode, director and chief curator of KNMA, and designed by Visioni Srl of Rome, was two years in the making, and it’s not difficult to see why. It traces the long arc of Husain’s prolific career (he’s often called India’s Picasso, and he was almost as prolific), and includes photos, poems, and voice clippings. Husain’s early canvases reveal the drama of a people becoming a nation with haunting strains of Geeta Dutt and Ghulam Ali playing in the background.

Asked why the KNMA embarked on such an ambitious exercise, founder Kiran Nadar says, “As a modernist and one of the founding members of the Progressive Artists’ Group, he was one of the pioneers of Indian art, but I felt he never got his due. This is my homage to an artist that I have very high regard for.”

Explaining the title of the show ‘ Rooted Nomad ’, Karode says Husain’s life was all about journeys, whether it was the gullies of Nizamuddin, the busy streets of Mumbai, and later in Doha, Dubai and London (where he had to pay up for doodling on hotel napkins). “All of those travels come into his work in different ways and forms. He is a multi-faceted artist, and the intention of this exhibition is to focus especially on his early formative years when he ran away from a small town to Bombay and had to sleep on the footpath, work in furniture and toy factories to fulfil his dreams of becoming a painter,” she says. A very evocative soundbite in the immersive captures his passion: “I have this brush in my hand – if nothing happens, I will whitewash the wall of the people – but I will never leave this.”

At the end of the immersive, one comes away with the feeling that Husain, who loved cinema and even tried his hand at filmmaking, would have been thrilled to see himself as the subject of an immersive. “I think he would have put us out of a job, and made it himself,” laughs Eric Pender, whose company Visioni Srl made the immersive.

The Rooted Nomad runs in Venice till Nov 24.