M.F. Husain's Rare Masterpieces Return
Unseen for years and once locked in a bank vault, MF Husain’s rare works—a fever dream of 20th-century history—are finally headed for auction.
By all accounts, Maqbool Fida Husain never did anything in half-measures.
In 2004, aged 89, Husain embarked on what may have been his most ambitious project yet: a series of 100 paintings to document “the century that I have lived through.” He called it OPCE—Our Planet Called Earth. Only 25 canvases were completed, but they bristle with the scope of a hundred.
These 25 works—once locked in a bank vault due to a messy financial dispute—are finally headed for the auction block at Pundole’s on June 12, under the title MF Husain: An Artist’s Vision of the XX Century.
A Radical With a Brush
Born in 1915 (some records say 1913), Maqbool Fida Husain was a billboard painter in Bombay before he became the face of Indian modern art. A founding member of the Progressive Artists’ Group in 1947, Husain helped spearhead a revolution that tossed aside colonial academic realism and turned instead to Cubism, folk art, temple sculpture, and the vibrant visual traditions of India. Together with artists like F.N. Souza and S.H. Raza, he redefined what modern Indian art could look like.
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His paintings—bold, chaotic, always pulsing with energy—drew from mythology, cinema, rural life, and politics. He painted Mother Teresa and Madhuri Dixit with equal intensity. His horses were legendary. His female nudes, controversial. He stirred outrage and admiration in equal measure.
For Husain, to paint the 20th century in his OPCE series was not to recreate it, but to confront it. With his trademark visual shorthand—galloping horses, dismembered limbs, deified women, and looming masculine silhouettes—he didn’t just record events; he rewrote their emotional tone. This is the century, after all, that birthed Gandhi and Chaplin, moon landings and mushroom clouds, jazz and genocide.
We see the trenches of World War I, the horrors of World War II, the rise of cinema, aviation, and the space race. There are tributes to Mahatma Gandhi, Humphrey Bogart, Charlie Chaplin, and Marcel Marceau. Nature and war collide. Modernity and mythology spar.
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In the OPCE series, Husain tried to make sense of it all: the trauma, the triumph, the absurdity. Think of it as Picasso’s Guernica meeting Bollywood’s Technicolor bravado—because only Husain could oscillate between Goya and Raj Kapoor in a single brushstroke.
For instance, in his OPCE 3, 25, and 23, the triptych is probably the most enigmatic in his series. We are literally forced to stop and ask: what is going on here? A group of cherubs holds up a bench, the frontal or rear view of figures seated at a bench or table precariously held up by magical helper figures. Two explorers or soldiers sit at one end of the composition, while a Jeevesian figure in an incongruous top hat and tailcoat brings in a drink on a tray at the other end. There’s a stranger who lies on the bench, who is he? We’ll never know.
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The series includes characters as eclectic as Humphrey Bogart and Mahatma Gandhi, as well as Husain’s beloved horses—his enduring metaphor for power, freedom, and chaos. Here, history is not linear; it is layered. World Wars blend into space races, cinema overlaps with revolution, and nostalgia collides with modernity. The OPCE series is less about documenting time than compressing it—flattening an entire era into a fever dream of colour, symbol, and satire.
It’s this compression, this refusal to categorise, that makes Husain’s late work so magnetic. Husain painted not from textbooks but from memory, myth, and gut instinct.
Controversy and Creative Legacy
Of course, Husain never got to complete the remaining 75 canvases. The deal, initially struck with industrialist Guru Swarup Srivastava for ₹100 crores, went off the rails after allegations of loan fraud surfaced. The paintings eventually became legal hostages. They were seized by the National Agricultural Co-operative Marketing Federation (NAFED), stored in vaults, and locked away from public view for years.
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But maybe it’s fitting that Husain’s most ambitious series would be wrapped in controversy. The man who was once dubbed “India’s Picasso” was no stranger to provocation. He’d been hounded out of his homeland, his works burned, lawsuits filed against him for painting Hindu goddesses in the nude. Eventually, Husain took Qatari citizenship and died in exile in London in 2011.
A Time Capsule With a Pulse
Before they are sold to the highest bidder, these works will be exhibited at Hamilton House in Mumbai from June 8 to 11. It’s a rare chance for the public to encounter Husain not as a scandal, or a slogan, or even a superstar—but as a seer.
For years, the OPCE paintings existed in a kind of suspended animation, legally frozen and largely forgotten outside art circles. Their return marks a rare moment when commerce, culture, and history intersect.
The paintings themselves are some of Husain’s most layered works. There’s a rawness to them—both visually and thematically—that speaks to a mind racing to capture everything at once. It’s Husain’s century, in all its madness.
It is also to share space with a man who believed that the story of a planet could be told in 100 paintings—and who, even at 89, was willing to try.
The Auction at a Glance
What: M.F. Husain: An Artist’s Vision of the XX Century
When: Auction on June 12, 2025 | Preview: June 8–11
Where: Hamilton House, South Mumbai
Who: 25 paintings from the OPCE series
Why It Matters: A rare chance to witness and acquire works from a defining (and divisive) chapter of modern Indian art history.