M F Husain’s massive 10-foot tall mural-sized painting created in 1975 as a backdrop for former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s public rally is on display at the renowned Asia Society Museum.
The 60-foot wide oil on canvas painting ‘Lightning’ depicts horses, among Husain’s favourite subjects to paint, on 12 large panels put together.
Husain, one of the founding members of the Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group created the painting as part of a series of paintings about India’s first female Prime Minister.
Gandhi had completed 11 years as prime minister and was addressing a meeting in Shivaji Park in Mumbai, then called Bombay in 1975.
Husain painted ‘Lightning’ as a backdrop to this meeting.
The exhibition ‘M F Husain – Art and The Nation’ will run at the leading museum and cultural organisation through August 4.
Asia Society has been lent the painting by entrepreneur, investor and art collector Kent Charugundla, who had purchased the artwork from Husain in December 2002.
The painting is filled with visual references to India in the 1970s as well as to Gandhi.
“Lightning of M F Husain for India is what Guernica of Picasso is for Spain,” Charugundla said, referring to Picasso’s most famous 1937 anti-war painting created in response to the bombing of Guernica, a Basque Country town in northern Spain, by Nazi Germany.