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MAQBOOL FIDA HUSAIN (1915-2011) Untitled (Keehn Family Portrait) signed and dated in Hindi (upper left) oil on canvas 56 x 37 7/8 in. (142.2 x 96.6 cm.) Painted in 1960
Over the eight years that Thomas B. Keehn and his family spent in India, from 1953 to 1961, they developed a lifelong love for the country and its people and supported its nascent modern art community with great passion. Noting the Keehns’ role in advancing the cause of modern Indian art, the journalist and feminist icon Gloria Steinem wrote, “I remember dinners at the Keehns’ house in New Delhi. There was always warmth, good conversation [...] Guests might also find a new painting by a modern Indian artist – perhaps the same artist filling up on understanding and good food – because Martha and Tom were not just observers, but part of India's cultural life. It says so much about them that they would spend their slender resources on new art and living artists [...] They not only collected art, but helped to make sure there would be a future art to be collected” (G. Steinem, India Ink, New Delhi, 2000, p. 89).
The present lot, painted by Maqbool Fida Husain in 1960, represents both the family’s close relationship with the artist as well as Husain’s mastery at capturing his closest friends’ likenesses on canvas. This bold, expressionistic portrait was the second Husain painted of the family, created only a year after the first. This second version, formatted vertically with the six Keehn children portrayed in a tight group below the loving and protective gaze of their parents, served as an update to the original portrait as it included the newest family member, Joel Keehn, who was born in India earlier that year and is depicted as a cherubic baby at the very heart of this composition.
When Christie’s presented selections from the Keehn Collection at auction in 2011-12, the success that the group met with spoke of the importance of the works on offer and of the recognition of Tom and Martha Keehn’s pivotal contribution to the development of what we know today as modern Indian art.