The Chinese influence on Indian modern art: M. F. Husain and Xu Beihong

The Chinese Influence on Indian art

The Indian artist M.F. Husain, like the Chinese artist Xu Beihong, painted so many horses through his career that his name, like Xu's, practically became synonymous with the animal.

Anyone who is familiar with the works of both artists can't help but wonder if one influenced the other.

In fact, Xu's work predates Husain's by twenty years and had a deep impact on the celebrated Indian artist.

In 1951, when Husain was twenty-six years old, he traveled to China with a cultural delegation from India. There, he met Xu, who was a pioneer of modern Chinese art and also the president of the National Central Academy of Art in Beijing. Xu was by then a man of great standing in the Eastern art world. His paintings of horses had become emblematic of Chinese artists' attempts to combine the East and West, also a preoccupation of Indian artists.

Husain might have been familiar with Xu's work even prior to his Beijing trip, as Xu had travelled to India many times between 1939 and 1941 to raise money for the Chinese war effort. On these trips, Xu would visit the great poet Rabindranath Tagore at his campus in Shantiniketan and also held several exhibitions of his art.

Interestingly, the Chinese influence on Indian modern art went beyond a single artist: V. S. Gaitonde also looked east for inspiration. Nine years younger than Husain, Gaitonde was influenced by the art of the Zen masters and Chinese ink brush painting, although his first exposure to Eastern art occurred in New York. 

The best horses, by the way, are native to neither China nor India, though both cultures have been obsessed with horses throughout history. In fact, the best breeds come from West and Central Asia, giving the nomadic invaders from these regions a marked military advantage over the foot soldiers of China and India. 

For thousands of years, Indian and Chinese emperors spent obscene amounts of money (and often expended many human lives) in order to import the finest horses from West and Central Asia. Proof that the exotic and the rare have always captured human imagination.

Sources:

Susan S. Bean, "M.F. Husain: The Artist who Embraced the World and Lost his Home," V & A Magazine, 2014.

H. G. Creel in "The Role of the Horse in Chinese History," The American Historical Review, 1965.

Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History, 2009.