Huge loss for India, tragic for Husain to die in exile:artists

New Delhi, Jun 9 (PTI) Friends and admirers of M F
Husain were Thursday at a loss of words at the demise of the
painter famously dubbed 'Piccaso of India' and angry at the
fact that he had to die in a foreign land.
From contemporaries Kishen Khanna and Anjolie Ela
Menon to younger artists like Jitish Kallat a sense of shock,
disbelief and grief prevailed among the art fraternity which
mourned the death of the 95-year-old painter, a long time
associate for many who said they found it difficult to
visualise an art scene without the maverick.
"I knew he was in hospital for some time but am very
sad to hear about his demise. Husain was a very, very close
friend. I knew him long before his first exhibition in 1954,"
Khanna, a close friend and fellow painter of the Progressive
Art movement, told PTI.
Husain along with F N Souza had founded the
Progressive Art movement in India in the 1960s and had invited
Delhi-based Khanna, who worked as a banker, to be a part of
it.
"He had given me several paintings and we had
exchanged our paintings. After I left my bank job we used to
meet often and talk and discuss. He used to visit me in Kanpur
and in Chennai," Khanna said.
Jatin Das, who has known Husain since the 1950s,
remembered the barefoot-bohemian painter as his "very very
dear friend" but said the people of India should be sad that
his desire of settling in India remained unfulfilled as the
government did not assure him security.
The artist was living in exile after death threats
issued to him for his controversial paintings of Hindu
deities.
Another well-known painter Anjolie Ela Menon could not
hide her shock when she heard the news. "I have known him for
55 years, he has touched my life in so many ways and so often.
It is difficult to visualise that he is no more and I had
never realised that he had aged," she said.
Menon said, "After his so-called exile, people who
revered and loved him had made it a point to go and meet him
every year. Last week, when I was in London, his sons Shahbad
and Shamshad had said that he was out of trouble but I now
realise that he was ill. I met him in London and Dubai every
year."
Contemporary artist Jitish Kallat said it was tragic
that the painter had to breath his last in a foreign country.
"It is a huge loss for anyone related to the arts and
also as an artist I almost feel as historically a huge
canopy has been blown away from us, extinguished. I feel a
sense of huge loss.
"It is also a tragic feeling that he had to die in a
foreign country. It is a pain, I think it a black mark on the
Indian state which has not understood the immensity and the
relevance of Husain," said the painter.
Kallat describes Husain's paintings as "a unique
artistic talent which merged European modernism with the
textures of post colonial modernism."