Maqbool Fida Husain (1915-2011) is a cornerstone of both the gallery and South Asian modern art; one cannot overstate the importance of his practice and the influence he had. A Beautiful Friendship: Husain and Herwitz is the second solo of Husain at Aicon in the last decade. The last time he adorned the walls was with Husain at Hundred, which opened in conjunction with the celebration of his centenary, in 2015.
Since 2015, much has changed from a market perspective: Husain has regained the auction world record with Gram Yatra selling for $13,750,000, smashing both his previous auction record and leapfrogging Tyeb Mehta, F. N. Souza, S. H. Raza, and V. S. Gaitonde in the process.
But the story does not start with blockbuster headlines, rather with friendship, and it is this loving and supportive relationship that we explore in this exhibition.
The artist-patron relationship is as old as art itself, with evidence of patronage dating back to the beginnings of civilization. Who would Michelangelo have become without Lorenzo de Medici or William Shakespeare without the Earl of Southampton? No one knows, and of course, it is better this way. Humanity would have been starved of many great artworks and artists without patronage. Chester and Davida Herwitz were pioneering patrons, trailblazers, incredibly generous human beings, and collectors in the purest sense.
Chester and Davida Herwitz first met Husain during business trips to India in the 1960s. It was on one such trip that they encountered his seminal painting, Zameen (1955), at the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi. Their initial encounter blossomed into something more, with Husain introducing them to other Indian artists and artists’ groups. The relationship they had with Husain was instrumental in the Herwitzes’ decision to focus on and collect Indian art, which they did for over two decades, amassing the finest collection of Indian modern art in the process. They collected no one more than Husain himself:
People often ask me why I have so many Husains. It has to do with the continuing vision of the artist. And what has Husain not done! From ’66 till this day I see him as a one-man happening.
—Chester Herwitz (R. Shahani, “An Indian frame of reference,” The Sunday Times of India, 5 February 1995)
Husain’s background in billboard painting gave rise to two pivotal aspects of his future practice: first, an understanding of how to communicate visually with the ‘everyman’ of India; and second, a strong appreciation for the high drama of Bollywood, both of which can be seen in many of the works collected by Chester and Davida. Husain’s odyssey to discover the most immediate communicative elements of painting drew him to the residual remains of Cubism, earning him an invitation in 1971 to exhibit alongside Pablo Picasso at the São Paulo Biennial. Thus, by the early 1970s, Husain had become a star, and he reached an international level of prestige unparalleled by any other Indian artist of his time. The Herwitzes must have found comfort in seeing their friend rise to the top and receive the Padma Bhushan in 1973.
Included in the exhibition is 3 Unidentified Men on Hilltop (1969), which was auctioned in the second public auction of Indian art: “Contemporary Indian Paintings, From the Chester and Davida Herwitz Charitable Trust.” The auction took place at Sotheby’s New York in April of 1996. The two auctions in 1995 and 1996 marked the beginning of the modern and contemporary South Asian art market as we know it today and were simultaneously a celebration of the Herwitz collection. Funds generated by these auctions would eventually become part of the endowment given by the Herwitzes to the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) in Salem, MA.
The Herwitz collection eventually grew to include over 3,000 works, many of which have been exhibited at storied institutions such as the Tate Gallery in London, the Pompidou Center in Paris, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, the Worcester Art Museum and the Grey Gallery in Manhattan. In 2001, their generous gift of 1,275 works of art to the PEM made it the first museum outside of India to focus on the achievements of India’s modern artists. The Herwitzes also donated their personal archive to the museum. In their files, no other artist features as much as Husain, including a 1970s essay on the artist written by Chester himself.
In the simplest of terms, the friendship of artist and patron allowed Husain to be a pioneering figure, merging Western modernist techniques with themes from India’s epic historical and mythological texts, along with its ongoing struggle for an independent modern identity and stability in a post-colonial world. South Asian modern art would not have been the same without this relationship. A Beautiful Friendship features over a dozen paintings and several works on paper, half of which are from the Chester and Davida Herwitz Collection. There are works from as early as 1958 and as late as 2009 on display, showcasing the broad range of styles and themes explored by this monumental figure of Indian modernism.
